Tomato
5mo ago
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
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There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
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It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
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Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
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US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
Tomato
6mo ago
I think Biden's and Trump's domestic policy will look basically identical.
Biden did the painful but necessary task of getting us out of Afghanistan. I guess Trump didn't start any wars but he didn't end any either.
I think Biden has done a great job building international coalitions, particularly as a counter to China, and I don't think that foreign leaders trust Trump to do that (and I also think he's too erratic and untrustworthy).
Tomato
6mo ago
I know all the e/acc people have framed this as small minded safetyism vs. progress but I saw a thread somewhere from the other side that framed it more as banal corporate money making (eg laundry buddy) vs. actual deep progress. That sort of comports my my observation of e/acc people, despite talking a big game, actually being hordes of boring laundry buddy founders and vcs.
Tomato
6mo ago
Why does every guy on Twitter with “e/acc” in his bio run an incredibly boring b2b productivity software startup whose only customers are other identical startups?
Tomato
6mo ago
There were not. My coworkers and I would pass by Zucotti park a lot to get lunch looking very bankery and it was all quite peaceful.
Tomato
6mo ago
Every Muslim I can think of in the US is chill and successful. They’re stereotypically doctors and IT workers.
Tomato
6mo ago
He also misses the obvious point that even if people in Hamas are crazed terrorists who must blindly kill, there’s a lot you can do to prevent people from being crazed terrorists who must blindly kill in the first place (e.g., by not killing tons of Palestinians or conquering their land in the West Bank).
Tomato
6mo ago
I think there’s a legitimate national security issue around people breaking into property used by the president’s family and so I’m fine with them shooting at the thieves even though I would oppose it if it was a regular person’s car.
Tomato
6mo ago
they’ve never been interested in meta level principles
Almost nobody is interested in meta level principles. Tons of the same right-adjacent people who were advocating for free speech and against cancelling were instantly on the front lines of trying to cancel pro Palestinian college students in the wake of the Hamas attack.
Some are self-conscious enough to justify it with slogans like “my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly” but ultimately a good model of public debate is that people advocate for their side on the object level using whatever weapons they can.
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
- The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
- Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
- Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
- I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
- How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
- The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
- Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
- For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Tomato
6mo ago
Seriously, what do people like him expect? “Oh the name on this scholarship sounds kinda Jewish, I love Israel now.”
Tomato
6mo ago
I always thought it was ultra cringe to have these rando finance guys’ names plastered over everything in academia, which should be above that. Hopefully schools learn their lesson and stop bothering with these clowns.
Honest question---do you think your views about the state of the economy are falsifiable? What are some things you could see that would make you change your mind?
Here are some examples of things that if a few of them were happening at once would make me think the economy was bad:
- A few quarters of negative real GDP growth
- Big increases in unemployment
- Big increases in inflation
- Increasing household default or delinquency
- Increases in the number of people who say the economy is bad
BTW here's a list of things I think are not good in the economy, but these are all longer-to-medium term issues and I think my ability to forecast is not great. These things are themselves not directly bad but can cause bad things on the preceding list.
- Growing national debt with no real political way out (Ds want to keep doing dumb fiscal stimulus, Rs want to keep doing dumb fiscal stimulus (through tax cuts))
- Lack of housing supply (a national issue that's the sum of a thousand local issues)
- Lack of meaningful innovation (I increasingly think a ton of tech/vc stuff is run by charlatans and is totally fake and gay, including AI/LLM stuff)
- Low fertility (although the US is probably better situated here than anybody else)
Tomato
6mo ago
Put aside all the arguments about statistics or how to calculate inflation or whatever.
When asked how they’re doing economically, the vast majority of people say they’re doing well.
Maybe you aren’t doing well.
One way that could happen is that everyone else is actually doing badly but they’re all lying about it and the official statistics are also made up.
Another way that could happen is that even though most people are doing well, not everybody is, and unfortunately maybe you or friends are among those who aren’t. Fortunately things are very cyclical and dynamic idiosyncratically so this is unlikely to last for long.
I certainly have a view about which one is more likely (my view doesn’t require a bunch of people to be lying) but it’s not likely something that can be resolved on this forum.
The original poster is absolutely right though. This double standard with which this place scoffs at most “lived experiences” arguments but seems so vulnerable to it when the argument is on the “other side,” so to speak, really speaks to a lack of what you might call intellectual empathy.
Tomato
6mo ago
I’m sure he has some more complete and subtle model of the US government than I do, but isn’t it kind of strange on its face to say “yeah the Israel lobby has special influence over US policy but it’s no big deal because the actual government departments whose job it is to handle these matters have more influence?”
As an American citizen I would find it incredibly fucked up if Israel ever overrules the Pentagon or the State Department on anything.
Tomato
6mo ago
I genuinely don’t know what you’re looking for. People say they’re doing good. Dems think other people are doing good. Republicans, who also think they’re doing good, think other people are doing bad. I’m not sure who these other people republicans are worried about are but I hope things get better for them (in the minds of republicans!)
Tomato
6mo ago
I mean sure, if 3% vs 12% is what changes your mind then fine, but this seems like totally missing the point. I can find some other small sliver of consumption where prices are down or flat. Most people are out there acting concerned as if food is 50% of people’s spending.
Tomato
6mo ago
My economic life and the lives of everyone around me is incredibly good, so it’s useful for me to look at statistics to see how far-off people in different areas with different professions and backgrounds are doing. And when I look at the data it turns out they’re doing great too!
Tomato
6mo ago
The rhetorical dynamic is the following:
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economists have thought really hard about how to measure inflation and have sophisticated data and tools to do it. They do their thing and say that year over year inflation is 4% or whatever.
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weird zerohedge people notice that mayonnaise prices at target are higher by 75% and from this conclude that the federal reserve is lying about inflation.
I think people in #2 get confused because food is so important to live while flat screen tvs are not. So when food prices go up they think a lot of people must be about to starve. It’s useful to point out to these confused people that food, while necessary to live, is so cheap relative to Americans’ income that food prices can increase a lot and it doesn’t really matter. Hence headline inflation can be low even though mayonnaise at target seems expensive, and nevertheless headline inflation is the thing we should care about.
Tomato
6mo ago
Well, experts think people’s situations are good, the consensus people have is that their own situation is good, and there’s a partisan split on whether they think others’ situations are good. There’s a little logic 101 game we can play here in identifying who is wrong about what.
Tomato
6mo ago
Throw whatever food categories you want, the point is people spend a tiny amount of their income on food.
In my area I had a buddy's rent jump up 25% in one year when he renewed.
Yeah I mean landlords are famously slow and chunky while adjusting. Sorry that happened to a guy you know.
The point is people are out here talking like there’s some conspiracy to hide the fact that prices 100% higher than they used to be when in fact they aren’t and wages have increased along with the modest price increases.
All that aside, the following facts:
- majorities think their own situation is good
- dems think others’ situations are good
- reps think others’ situations are bad
Really kind of gives away what’s happening, right?
Tomato
6mo ago
I see. I 100% agree with you then. This is a good example where experts are right and there's a big disconnect for people. Interesting why it breaks down so strongly on partisan lines though.
Tomato
6mo ago
"Housing costs" as defined in that link would be housing costs for someone becoming a homeowner for the first time. I agree that it's rough if you're a first-time homeowner but that's a pretty small slice of the population. Most people already have homes (so house price increases are good) and have fixed rate mortgages (so rate increases are irrelevant).
The rent chart you showed has rental prices increasing at about a 6-7% annual rate, which I agree is annoyingly high but doesn't seem catastrophic?
Staple foods are a pretty small share of people's consumption basket. (Food at home is about 4% of people's expenditures: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/)
Ultimately you're getting at something correct, but I don't think in the way you meant it to be. There's a huge disconnect between what people think the economy is (that people mostly consume lettuce and mayonnaise and half of the economy are coal miners) and what it actually is.
Or you just pull out on days where she’s fertile? My wife got pregnant exactly when we wanted her to and not a moment too soon following this time tested method.
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