anti_dan
2yr ago
More likely:
He was doing some other stupid activity in the vicinity of the bike, not paying much attention because he has a low attention span, as teens do.
She swipes the bike, gets on, he and his company run over to stop her.
That is the charitable take that is mildly plausible. But he's still a criminal in that scenario.
anti_dan
2yr ago
Nybbler is, as often the case, correct. Understanding the crime problem requires understanding and accepting that the progressive project failed, and cannot be redeemed. As is prominently mentioned in the OP, he still believes the state can provide, "high quality education, healthcare, and public transit" to all its citizens. These thoughts are at odds with the goal of fixing crime, or reality, or both.
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High quality education is just middling education given to talented students. Students make the school, teachers barely do anything.
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High quality healthcare is state of the art healthcare, this is always expensive, being state of the art. Thus it cannot be free. Nor does it matter much. Reliable plumbing is 10x+ as important for life expectancy. Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.
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Public transit cannot be for all and be good. This is the progressive crime problem remade. Everything good in society must exclude the bad people forcefully. Over and over.
anti_dan
2yr ago
What is the plausible mechanism behind which research that shows these kind of results are created? Are they measuring something that is real (i.e. does a more diverse workforce actually make companies more money)? Or are the brilliant people at McKinsey meticulously hand-selecting the companies to design studies which will show the opposite of reality?
It works like this:
Step 1: High margin firm with very few workers comes into existence (Google, Apple, etc)
Step 2: Add diversity hires to avoid lawsuits
Step 3: Firm is still high margin because it still has very few employees
Step 4: Compare said firm to Ford, Waste Management, etc that have 1 million male working class workers.
anti_dan
2yr ago
Nearly every complaint I've ever heard about themotte being too far right just comes off as incredibly whiny. If you want to parrot simplistic leftist talking points to an unquestioning audience, become a middle school history teacher.
anti_dan
2yr ago
I’ve said it before, but the January 6th defendants are lucky that, contra their reputation here, American elites are so magnanimous in victory. In a more serious country (perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating), even the perpetrators of such a pathetic attempt at insurrection would have been shot.
Did you make the same argument about the BLM rioters that tried to push down the White House fence? You know the one's who famously were not tracked down via phone data geotargeting, thousands of hours running facial recognition algorithms and a massive social media snitch-rewarding campaign? To the wall with them!
anti_dan
2yr ago
I read the article and it is a tour de force in using lots of words to say very little. I suppose it is a bit idealistic (albeit in an utopian way I don't think is plausible), but it is simultaneously lacking any substance. Suburbs with lots of trains and buses? Sure. How? A bus route that serves 3 people a day is a massive waste, and is what subsidized busing in the suburbs actually looks like. Diversity? I see people of races doing things of all sorts, how are you going to overcome fundamental differences? Is it going to be reparations forever? Then say that. Say what you mean, not nothing and lovingly allow your fellow travelers insert their utopian dreams into it.
anti_dan
11mo ago
They are literally deleting and rewriting articles about Kamala being named border czar in 2021 and being ranked the furthest left senator in 2019. Its very much a "we were always at war with Eastasia"
anti_dan
1yr ago
I don't consider it much of a "rare" miss. I find Hanania's writings increasingly incoherent across the board, and I think he is generally searching for an odd niche to try and maintain relevance now that his actual big splash in has waned. Trying to balance takes in the anti-woke sphere to ensure you are "respectable" tends to put you into a land of comments that are either uninteresting, or fallacious, and thats where this one, and a lot of them recently, have landed.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I live by a large shelter for migrants in the city. They have a group of folks who are dedicated to this candy/soda selling on the side of the road. The main reason I think these people are here is for the schools. Word was out from day 1 that they could and should enroll the kids in schools and they have. The local bus stops are bustling with migrants from 6-8am and 3-4 pm. The resource strain is fairly acute, at least locally, on the schools and public transit. I will say they are polite and clean, but there are things that I am seeing as fairly big failure modes. These Venezuelans are terrible drivers, and have crappy cars, so there is a spike in them getting into accidents, where they don't have insurance, registration, or a driver's license. Not great for a court system and PD that is already hard up for manpower. I'm also a bit disappointed in the entrepreneurial spirit of the males in the camp. I tried to hire one to help me get a chair out of a u-haul and up 4 flights of stairs. No bites at $50 for one big ass chair.
anti_dan
2yr ago
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it.
This is just "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" all over again, or the Russian joke about the blank pamphleteer. The media being homogenously left provides them with a significant electoral advantage, but an even larger confusion problem when they don't win.
anti_dan
2yr ago
This really just strikes me as sneering. There is always going to be one or two humans that become figures of a thing when people perceive that thing to be against their interests. Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically. Most of the wild eye things they discuss at Davos will be mostly bad for most people if the Davos types get any of their policies pushed through before technology makes their preferences seem weird, outdates their ideas wholly, etc.
Take, for example, dishwashers. Almost everyone acknowledges that the new, Eco-friendly ones don't clean very well. Is this the machination of Klaus Schwab incarnate? No. But he, the WEF, etc are parts of the movement that floated the theories that led to crappy dishwashers being the norm. Does he argue for fiscal deregulation? Sure. This is a non-mover for the modern right. And basically everyone at Davos will eventually say something that embraces left-ish globohomo. Which is basically the enemy of the new right.
anti_dan
15d ago
If you read The Idea Factory with a somewhat critical eye you can easily see why Bell labs isn't happening now, and can't happen in the near future. Sure, some of their best guys went to MIT, but that was when you got into MIT by like taking a train there then passing an entrance exam. None of this extra-curricular and AP maxxing nonsense. But many of the main figures also just were like paperboys who were the small town genius and went to a random engineering school nearby. At some point, however, determining actual merit, talent, and skill became unfashionable for academics and hiring managers so they outsourced to boring metrics and racial adjustments.
anti_dan
7mo ago
If you think Bluesky is Twitter inverted, you are mistaken. Bluesky is just MSNBC extreme as a social media. Twitter is not right wing, it is just lacking in censorship of people right of center.
anti_dan
6mo ago
My cousin works in IT and he tells me its a stupid industry where you have to leave your job to get promoted. So yeah, if you took a bunch of dunderheads making $60k and now they are $150k workers but you didn't promote them alongside their expanded skillset that is on you. Remember, your company didn't take on any downside risk. You could have offered a multiyear contract with a buyout, but you didn't.
anti_dan
2yr ago
I can't imagine more than 6 white parents in the country find this sort of behavior acceptable no matter the demographics of the victim.
What is on display, in the charitable version of the story, is a display of extreme entitlement that only exists in Hollywood scripts when we are talking about white men.
anti_dan
2yr ago
I still don't get how the story is some big gotcha. Dobbs is one guy who said his peace on the issue. How is it worse for Fox's reputation if not everyone was on board with their one guy's biggest conspiracy theory. How is it somehow better that everyone at MSNBC genuinely believed the Hunter laptop was a geniusly schemed Russian plant? T
anti_dan
3mo ago
What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.
I want to talk about one of the first points in this article.
Beccaria argued that punishments should be intended primarily to deter future crimes rather than retaliate for past ones, and further, that three factors influenced the deterrent effect of punishment: its certainty, swiftness, and severity, in that order. Beccaria reasoned that increasing severity of punishment produced sharply diminishing returns on deterrent value, because people will simply become desensitized to severe punishment and have difficulty weighing it rationally when conducting a cost-benefit analysis of their decision to commit crimes.
I know this makes sense and has data backing it with regards to deterrence. But I want to talk about a vastly under-discussed part of incarceration, which is incapacitation.
As a bit of background, I am an attorney who has worked as a prosecutor as well as many other parts of the law over a mid sized career so far.
The argument about punishment is wrong, because the goal isn't just punishment, the goal is no more crimes by that specific individual during that specific time period that he/she is incarcerated. You see this most importantly IMO with people who are serial thieves. They will have an MO. Its either retail theft where they keep going to Macys and stealing something like perfume or $90 shirts, or they go into a grocery store and steal booze. Others have the MO of following Amazon trucks and hoovering up delivery boxes. The point is, often these people will have 3+ pending cases at once, then they take a plea, get a short sentence, then are back out thieving a year later, get 3 more cases, take a plea. Repeat for 30 years.
Prison can solve this problem. First, we can have legislatures eliminate sentences running concurrently for multiple offenses. Commit 3 thefts, get 1 year on each, that is 3 years instead of 1 (under the current system). Thats still a deal for the defendant because they are now facing a max of 18 instead of 6 years (or whatever the math is for your specific state). Second, bring back strikes laws. You do some time, next time you do more, third time there is release even if it is just nonviolent theft. These crimes do significantly impede the law and order of communities.
side note, this sort of pattern, while common with theft, is not only relating to theft. I have seen rap sheets where people have committed 5+ burglaries, went in for a year, then committed 3 more plus a kicker charge for drugs/guns and still got out in time to be back in court a year after that second sentencing. In fact, it even happens with violent crime. I recall one case where a person's rap sheet had over 5 armed robbery convictions on it within 5 years of being back in court on another armed robbery. This sort of sentencing structure defies anything resembling sanity.
So, my conclusion is that we probably need more policing as everyone generally suggests. Boots on the ground both deterring and investigating crime. BUT we also need people to just not being allowed back into society. At this point, mere incarceration is not enough. We also need to expedite the death penalty not just for murder and sex crimes, but for all common law crimes wherein the defendant has a previous felony common law conviction. This is a cost saving measure. The whole anti-death penalty bar needs to be put in a corner. There shouldn't even be sentencing hearings at some point. Just ask 12 people did this person commit this crime. If yes, 100 days later the defendant gets to walk the plank. Literally. We should also bring back public hangings to assuage the deterrence-inclined folks.
anti_dan
3mo ago
Here is why I think Nate is wrong:
The difference this time, I’d argue, is that a shutdown would have put Trump and Musk in a highly awkward position. They’ve been arguing that all these governmental services are wasteful and unnecessary. Then there’s a shutdown, and notable voter-facing operations like National Parks and air travel are affected. People get really mad.
Actually, that is what happens when Republicans try to shut down the government when a Democrat is President and his cronies are running all of the departments. This, combined with the mainstream corporate media being overwhelmingly Democrat-aligned means this generates a very effective public pressure campaign that gets all but the most rock ribbed Republicans to soil themselves and cave.
Given that Musk has already been going around chopping off bits of the government without affecting anyone not employed directly by those programs, we have a proof of concept that a Republican-run shutdown could easily be ignored for months by the general public. THAT is a disaster for Democrats. If Trump were a Rand Paul level deficit hawk (which Silver correctly notes he is not) he would have intentionally played this chicken game HARD, and probably won decisively. As it is, he got a minor win without taking much risk.
anti_dan
2yr ago
Because at worst she's objecting to people engaging in antisocial behavior.
anti_dan
2yr ago
I posit it is sort of magical bean type of thinking. Lots of people don't like mass imprisonment/institutionalization. They also happen to not like being assaulted/raped/murdered by smelly people on the subway, or don't like strolling through a park full of feces and needles. Mental health is the magic bullet that lets you mentally square this circle, you don't have to make tradeoffs! This theory also generally fits into the worldview of the modern PMC and other urbanites who value talking and words very highly. In this unrealistic theory of the world the steps go like this:
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Get people to talk to social workers and shrinks.
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They now are fully functional citizens who can work at whole foods and live in (totally available) housing just like them.
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Now the streets are also clean and safe.
anti_dan
2yr ago
having kids & taking care of them properly is insanely hard work compared to white collar labor. It's rewarding, but so is a successful career, or having interesting hobbies, or alternately partying & getting stoned all the time
I see this stated all the time, but it seems like a leftish version of copium to me. Women, particularly 30+ are increasingly unhappy, and are not having the number of kids they want. The hard work of children is not eternal compared to white collar work (which I haven't heard any colleagues of friends rave about, outside of a few positions that less than ~1% of all people can even have). I think what we are actually seeing is just confusion by all people in the 12-30 year old age range. I mean, for most people, work is work with little reward aside from bare sustenance. I even recall a bunch of girls in my HS AP/Honors courses basically 2 decades ago joking about how student loans were looming to cripple their entire life dreams. And that was 2 decades ago when tuition was much smaller, and the number of men for them at uni was much better.
What has actually happened? IMO it is that the US education industry is now almost fully a grifting parasite on the country. This was starting at least in the 80s, had become fully realized by 2000, and is now in a behemoth state (while still growing). On top of that, dating apps and social media generally have unleashed the most self destructive decision making of both sexes, unfortunately for women, these generally fall harder on them long term.
anti_dan
2yr ago
I suppose 100 IQ writers can't write 200 IQ characters.
This is a common problem IMO.
This is a classic misremembering of history that is repeated at Twitter (walked back a bit), Reddit, Youtube, etc. These sites were BUILT by right of center users because they were places that gave a platform for things outside the left wing media window (including even Fox). Stephan Moleneaux (sp?) was a power user on all three at one point. The_donald was once the most active subreddit. These sites only really started systematic censorship after they became the default platform for XXX sort of media. Its basically a classic bait and switch. People invested in the platforms when they were neutral or right of center. Then they basically came to those people and said, "haha that $10k is mine now."
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