curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
I mean I'm sure there's a moderately strong correlation among the general population, and a weaker but still significant one if you control for socioeconomic status (not intended as a euphemism, although lol), but I think this is worded too strongly to be true. Plenty of people are relatively honest in business dealings but have a strong sex drive and not a strong desire to be loyal.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence
Sure, it doesn't imply anything, but your one twin study from 2002 doesn't either. There's a lot of debate on the issue, and the person who I respect the most (Alex Strudwick Young)'s best guess iirc is around 50%.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
As I use codex/claude code to implement high-level features and do complicated changes with just a few lines of natural language, not really! I mostly just think the AI 2027 people are wrong to update that much upwards.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
This is a clever way for a politician to dodge a question, not 'epistemic virtue', imo. Politicians of all sides say things that sound reasonable sometimes, that itself doesn't make you virtuous. Like almost all politicians, he regularly lies about basic facts if they advantage his team, eg saying he could put mayors of cities in jail for sanctuary city policies. I wouldn't say he has less epistemic virtue than other politicians either - they all do this because if you don't you lose elections - but this is a stretch.
You really don't need to overthink it. Annexing territory is based. It's the kind of thing a STRONG MAN character would do on TV. It's swinging your dick around. It makes the right people excited and the right people angry. And it's not so implausible that, like annexing Canada, it just reads as a joke whenever you say it. Donald Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and the commander in chief of the military, he's the one making the decision to pursue this, and this just is how he thinks (alternate hypotheses fail to explain his behavior, eg the events around Liberation Day). He's the first Simulacra Level 4 President.
And it's not like there's not strategic logic to the US acquiring Greenland. It should've already happened (gwern link). All else equal, more land = more power. The US's past land purchases seem like good ideas in retrospect. You would prefer to directly control land rather than just lease military bases. I would prefer the US to control greenland (and canada) than not. Even if only to make travel simpler. This is part of why the idea's plausible enough for Trump to push this hard for it, it's not by itself stupid (though the way he's been pursuing it is) but it's not, I think, really why he wants it.
Even from a perspective that doesn't care about progressive moral values or democracy, the current government of Iran leaves much to be desired. Take the water crisis, caused by decades of mismanagement. How can a country with nuclear weapons struggle with water? How does a major oil producer have rolling blackouts? Or 40% annual inflation? That's really quite bad! These are bigger drivers of the protests than democracy! Protests of this sort are a natural check on government mismanagement, even when they don't overthrow the regime (which they usually don't), because they put pressure on the regime to keep the cost of goods low in a way somewhat similar to fair elections.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I've heard several anecdotal reports of people who took it and say it didn't really work. I don't think there's much risk of permanent damage though.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
Sure but you can see how we should have higher standards for supreme court justices than "a bit above average for judges"?
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity
... why? I don't read Supreme Court opinions much so I don't have an opinion on it myself, but this is the kind of thing that could be true, and would have significant political implications if so. Sotomayor being dumb isn't just a personal insult, it's a fact about a person that would make their rulings worse. And that the impact of her being maybe dumb is blunted by the rest of the court being less doesn't make it not worth discussing - if true, a trend of appointing more people like that could be really bad for the country! And it doesn't have to be an outgroup thing, you could easily imagine Trump getting mad about fedsoc judges 'cucking' and appointing some low IQ people himself.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
In practice, if I just want to get something of simple-moderate complexity done, the best UI library is react. It works, the functional style is nice, there are whatever libraries you need. Web browser APIs have problems, but I'd much rather interact with them than deal with native stuff. UI latency is fine if you don't do anything complicated, a lot of optimization work's gone into the browser, and you get cross platform + mobile easily. Javascript kinda sucks but it's fine. And you probably don't need electron, just make a website.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
Trump could've just asked Bukele to say "I won't let you take gang members back, of course" and then Trump would've said "oh well". Instead, though, Bukele said "I can't smuggle a gang member back into the US", implying Trump's stance stance was not allowing him to come back.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Tell me you've never worked in the semiconductor industry without telling me you've never worked in the semiconductor industry.
No need for the 'without', I did say that.
This isn't an area I have much knowledge in though.
Most of the manufacturing needed for defense isn't chips though. And the chips point goes both ways - if it's that hard to relocate, tariffs aren't going to do it either
TSMC has fabs in the US now?
TSMC Arizona's first fab started high-volume production of its N4 process technology in the fourth quarter of 2024
I don't think military tech uses latest-generation chips.
This isn't an area I have much knowledge in though.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Ok I see, that was worded weirdly, and I should've clarified that, but this supports my main point that this ruling does nothing to prevent Trump from carrying out deportations in general
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I think he could. You don't have to do the deportations this year. Trump has four years. Spend the first two building up the organization while doing smaller test runs, and then the last two years churning through deportations. If Trump made it his #1 priority, as you'd expect from the way the New Right frames the importance of demographic change, he could get a lot more funding for ICE, and could just hire a bunch of people. And he has many options for external manpower too - local police, red state governors, the national guard. Even the military is an option under the Insurrection Act.
There just aren't that many people who want that job.
Sure, but the US has 350 million people. Make it pay well and you'll find hundreds of thousands of takers.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I don't understand the argument here. The thing you are paying for is the construction of those factories. And the factories for the inputs. This is expensive. But so are tariffs.
And you don't need to source literally all of the inputs (for instance the electronics) domestically. China is not the only country we can import inputs from. We have allies.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
It's gonna be tough, because they don't just have to be worried for their jobs, they have to be more worried for their jobs via general election than via primaries. It takes a lo to make primary voters disregard Trump saying 'THIS TRAITOR KILLED OUR BEAUTIFUL TARIFFS! VOTE HER OUT!'.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
This is one of the worst arguments for tariffs! If we want arms factories, we can just spend 1% of our GDP on arms factories, have some competent individual (I would've picked Elon a year ago but we've seen how that's gone) manage 'procurement' instead of the existing bureaucracies, and we'll have a ton of arms factories. We do not need to make shoes to make missiles.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
ICE lacks the manpower to actually deport millions of people
This is something Trump could fix if he was somewhat competent, or delegated the authority to someone competent. He isn't and hasn't though.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Most people who are geniuses in one area are kind of mediocre in other areas. Trump's a genius at entertaining and getting votes, and he's terrible at economic policy. Why are those two particularly related?
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I re-read my comment and I don't think I implied otherwise?
Interesting article. Let's read it.
The big picture: The Trump administration fought a lower court order to return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian national who the government erroneously deported, arguing the judge's order imposes on the president's foreign policy powers.
Okay. "Erroneously deported". Maybe this is liberal media slander. Let's see where the link goes.
A Salvadorian national living in Maryland legally was wrongly deported to El Salvador, the Department of Justice has admitted in court papers filed Monday.
They admitted it? Maybe this is spin from the ... biased reporters at ... Axios? Well, let's click.
It's a filing by the government, defending their position. From the "Statement of Facts"
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia is a citizen and native of El Salvador, and his coplaintiffs are his U.S. citizen wife and five-year-old child, who reside in Maryland. Compl. ¶¶ 4–6, 42. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife work full-time to support their family.
During a bond hearing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) stated that a confidential informant had advised that Abrego Garcia was an active member of the criminal gang MS-13.
Although Abrego Garcia was found removable, the immigration judge granted him withholding of removal to El Salvador in an order dated October 10, 2019.
On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. Cerna Decl. ¶¶ 12–15. On March 16, a news article contained a photograph of individuals entering intake at CECOT.
Okay ... so he was protected from removal, and ICE should not have removed him and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.
And he was not merely "removed" to another country, but sent to a notorious prison for gang members, where it's unclear if he'll ever be able to leave. Due to an "administrative error". Without any due process to determine, for instance, whether he was actually a member of MS-13, whether this confidential informant's claims were true. When previously he was married to a US citizen and raising a five year old.
Let's read your second paragraph again:
Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.
What?
How did this sequence of thoughts occur to you?
Most illegal immigrants are not protected from removal. For those that are protected, there are ways to remove the protection, whether that be via executive orders (as trump has revoked TPS for many groups of illegal immigrants), laws (Republicans, in theory, have a trifecta, and could nuke the filibuster at any time for something of such great importance) or proceedings in courts. Even then, if the administration simply wanted him gone, they could have expelled this person to freedom in a foreign country, instead of a prison that El Salvador advertises as a hellish place you can never leave, and perhaps gotten a friendlier ruling.
The Trump Administration is not getting similar orders to return the over 275 other people sent to CECOT, because they weren't sent because of an "administrative error" like this one.
How does an order demanding this man return have anything at all to do with the ability of the Trump administration to deport illegal immigrants in general?
Woke tariffs are fantastically dumb and nobody should support them, but they’re probably only the second or third dumbest thing we’ve done to our economy this decade so far
This is only true if/because they're likely to be reversed quickly. If we kept these tariffs, including the 100% on China, on for six months, they'd be worse than the covid lockdowns.
They could kill 12k people if they wanted to, you're right it isn't hard. But I don't think they want to, and 12k deaths seems to me to be inconsistent with videos/images and reports coming out of Iran. There'd just be more evidence if true.
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