Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
The US is phenomenally wealthy - more so than peer developed nations. Despite this, it spend proportionally less, even after you factor out the large gap in military spending. This is a policy choice. We're not out of money. We're not brushing up against some hard upper limit of what a government can spend without wrecking the economy. We've chosen an arrangement where we get lower taxes and more consumer spending over higher taxes and more government services. This has consequences. Some of them are positive, but sometimes it's going to mean you underinvested in public services relative to the ideal case.
As I said in my other comment, it's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
And this “it’s only 1%-2% responses infuriates me.
This is why I mentioned that the same people who complain about foreign aid also don't want to spend money on disaster readiness and are just grinding an axe. What point is trying to be made? That we can't afford to fund FEMA because the Feds are giving all our money to foreigners? Objectively false (and I have uncharitable opinions about its roots). Is that we should spend less in general? If so, by all means say that, but it's pretty much the diametric opposite of "there's no money for our own citizens". It's saying we need to help people less. Maybe that's a more optimal outcome, but it's a very different point than what Stellula was bringing up.
But if you cut foreign side and ten other similar size useless programs, then you’ve made a real difference
Again, if you want to slash welfare, just say that. It's not like Congress was forced to choose between $100b to UA and $100b to FEMA.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
what are the odds his administration actually gets some new reactors built
Very low. On top of various regulatory burdens, nuclear has a major NIMBY problem where even people who like nuclear power often don't want it near them. Nuclear waste disposal facilities are even more contentious.
how do you feel about nuclear energy?
I think we should continue researching nuclear technology and keep active plants running. I have unreasonable hopes for the future of SMRs as well, but I think old school nuclear power's moment has passed and owes more present support to aesthetic preferences for mega-engineering and hippy-punching rather than practicality. We should have been building these plants 30 years ago, but as of right now solar + grid batteries is a vastly more fruitful line of investment (and that would remain true even if we magically slashed all the superfluous red tape (which we won't) and got a wizard to cast Protection from NIMBYs - a properly built nuke plant is still very expensive).
I've met people who have that energy, except 90% of them go around wrecking shit and making a mess while effete, low-agency people have to clean up after them. They're also usually incorrigible because they rarely have to deal with the consequences of "helping".
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.
The US Army probably couldn't evacuate Western North Carolina in a day under ideal circumstances with a perfectly compliant population, never mind in the wake of a major natural disaster. That's not some recent degradation of capability nor a comment on the urgency. Getting a million people out of a mountainous 10k square mile area is going to be an ordeal no matter what.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.
Can you elaborate, because I keep seeing people say things like this, and I don't get it? It just seems like a kneejerk disaste for foreign aid tied into the topic of the day*. The big Ukraine aid bill took like half a year to negotiate and almost failed. The Federal government spent ~$6 trillion in FY23. Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid and included support for the largest conventional war of the century.
*what's even more frustrating is that many of the same people who do this also object to spending money on disaster readiness
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
Does FEMA need additional funding?
Partly I am taking a shot at the claim that comes up every time there's some kind of disaster in the US (see also: Hawaii, East Palestine, wildfires, etc...) that foreign aid has somehow compromised our disaster response capabilities - often by the same people who oppose funding disaster preparedness - when in fact the US has capabilities for disaster relief so we don't have to respond in an ad hoc manner like we do with foreign events. When the question comes up: why aren't we doing X grand gesture of relief, the answer is usually that we have something more practical but less grandiose that we're already doing.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
I sure hope it doesn't take as long to deliver aid to North Carolina as Ukraine. Hopefully fewer fights over it in Congress as well. Maybe there should have been more funding for FEMA in the continuing resolution?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff.
Many American politicians have figured out that you can just ignore this stuff and people will probably forget about it. If you're sufficiently shameless you're basically scandal-proof. Also, the structure of US politics makes it harder to get rid of someone. A minister can be sacked, a PM can suffer a leadership challenge, an MP can be kicked off the party list. In the US, an elected official is only really accountable to their voters, and that goes double for state officials. Re: Covid specifically, it helped that basically everyone was ignoring the substance of Covid restrictions anyway.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
does this new evidence change your view
Not even a little.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
I think my point is reasonably clear and plain: people are signal boosting rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth because they don't care about whether the particulars are true. Given the context of the rest of the not-very-long post, I'm not sure how someone would read some other meaning into that sentence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
None of this seems to make sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems perfectly sensible: anti-immigration activists are repeating a rumor that supports their preferences. It might be true, it might be exaggerated, it might be a complete lie. Why bother checking? After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
She and her staff may not share my belief. Also, they may believe (possibly correctly) that not debating is worse than the likely outcome of an unimpactful debate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be?
Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.
Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.
5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.
What am I missing?
Trump is the Republican nominee for president
a) Trump appointed the SC majority that overturned existing precedent on abortion. b) Democratic voters believe (correctly) that many Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide and many more Republicans are happy to go along with that.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness
The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
The biggest negative element on most social media platforms (not just twitter) is recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement by stoking outrage and other negative emotions. I think there's a decent change we see significant regulation of algorithmic content recommendation in the near future, and that the present state of social media is looked back upon in much the same way we view the pre-60s state of affairs with respect to smoking.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.
If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.
This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).
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(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
I can assure you the English Tories I worked with 10-25 years ago did not fit the blue tribe stereotypes you are mentioning here.
This should not be surprising, since the Blue/Red tribe paradigm is attempting to explain subcultural divisions amongst White Americans. Applying it to the British seems wrong-headed.
If you're trying to explain why Congress won't adequately fund Federal disaster relief it's not. Especially when you're trying to compare a supplemental that took half a year to negotiate with additional funds for a disaster that happened last week.
The socially optimal amount of American tax dollars given to other countries is non-zero :V
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