curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!
In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It's just that it's not absolute! Having a constitutions moves you most of the way from 'the sovereign does whatever it wants' to 'you must strictly follow this document'. Just not all.
(I'm not claiming that the above is the way most lawyers or legal scholars would phrase it, although the article I linked was from a very good legal writer who also actively works on appellate and supreme court cases)
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
That’s the world of the original intent of the laws
Yeah, and I think this is substantively, object-level worse than the current system. I want to go to a restaurant in Florida without thinking about Florida food safety laws. For someone who lives in a smaller state, I want EPA regulations to apply to economic activity in neighboring states, because I ultimately share their air and water. In general it's sometimes easier to notice examples of regulatory overreach and don't notice all the skulls that regulations exist to patch up.
It would allow local restaurants to compete against the chain restaurants by giving them enough of a break that they can stay in business because they don’t have as high of a cost to own or run a business.
Right but it'd give them breaks on things like 'the food not having parasites and bacterial overgrowth' and pesticide use. I don't want that!
... Also as many of the regulations stifling local businesses are state-level or local as are federal, so I'm not sure this'd help in the long run.
The problem is that the definition of “interstate” has been stretched beyond all reasonable definitions
Yeah, it's an example of 'constitutional statesmanship'. The law says one thing, but it's just quite a lot better for the outcome to be the other thing, and this law's in the constitution so nobody else can change it - so let's just do the other thing. It shouldn't happen often, but it should sometimes! I mean, the decision giving SCOTUS the power to invalidate laws was itself an example of statesmanship, it's not really in the constitution either.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think the Trump admin settled the cases for cash, but I'm not aware of anything else. But, like, that's a specific example of overreach. I think agencies that truly had 'functionally no checks' would be able to get away with a lot more than that.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Indeed, it seems like they [USAID] used these programs to help maintain control Over the narrative and therefore Congress
What? This is completely implausible. I genuinely don't understand how one could believe this on any level other than 'someone on twitter said it'. So much money and energy is put into political ads, political entertainment, and such that what USAID is doing domestically is not relevant. It's absolutely true that USAID does a lot of media in foreign countries, and it's not necessarily untrue to describe it as propaganda aimed at foreign countries. But not the united states!
if the statute is ambiguous, then we defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law provided it is reasonable
It could be reasonable to describe this as 'giving agencies too much power. It's just not a lack of checks and balances though. Courts still often blocked agency actions, and agencies still couldn't do most of the things they wanted to. Like, I think you're making a good argument for 'agencies had too much power', but that's literally a different thing from 'functionally no checks. No balances'. They have, like, 50% too little checks and balances.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think that's a great example of aggressive reinterpretation of the constitution effectively changing the meaning. To some extent I think that - constitutional statesmanship, legal realism - is a good thing - I don't think the country would be better without the interstate commerce hack, I like that I can buy food in Alabama and know it's bound by federal regulations. (The alternative isn't no regulation, it's just having individual states set all regulations, I odn't think that's necessarily better).
I don't think that's a good example of a 'lack of checks and balances' for 'the administrative state'. It's an example of a negotiation between different centers of power, where the judiciary grants somewhat more power to the legislature at the expense of the states. The legislature has selectively granted a small amount of that power to the administrative state.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
There should have been someone better that would be willing to potentially burn their reputation in order to strip DEI from the Dept of Defense and make other needed reforms.
There are a lot of conservatives in the military, I find it very unlikely there weren't people willing to do that.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I gave an example with Austin, I think that's a pretty central example of qualified. The bios of other recent secdefs from wikipedia are also good examples.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't think this is true! All of Elon's biggest recent moves directly go against the Impoundment Control Act, an act that passed both houses by huge margins, to prevent exactly defunding parts of the government directly authorized by congress.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Imo there's clearly a lot wrong there. But this is one of the places where 'fire 80% of the people' isn't a good idea. It's often +EV, but a 20% chance of destroying twitter is fineE, it's just one website, while being ready for a conflict three months from now is critical. What you'd basically want to do IMO is let most of the bloated but currently working stuff continue to exist while you build something better.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Are they worth a damn or just a signal that for example Lloyd played politics really well?
I think there's still a significant meritocratic element left in the military! And that's not just credentials, those are roles he occupied where he did command a lot of people.
Necessarily that meant picking someone who doesn’t have the credentials but hopefully has innate competency.
I wouldn't have complained if they'd picked, like, a very successful founder/CEO to modernize the military. That'd be great, actually. Instead they picked a Fox News host. "hopefully has innate competency" ... isn't very convincing tbh
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Isn't it? Trump, 50 R senators, and a R majority of the House could pretty much immediately nuke the filibuster and repeal/revoke all of that. They're not going to, and that's, depending on your perspective, the checks and balances working, or the checks and balances failing, but they could.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Understand that for the last fifty years the administrative state has run amok with functionally no checks.
Can you give a specific example of this you think is representative? I think there are a lot of possible criticisms of government bureaucracy, but they are very 'checked' by congress and the courts. Courts limit or grant power to agencies all the time, and Congress for the most part creates them and grants them any of the power they have. Agencies can't do most things they want to do, and they have to work within the complicated game the courts and legislature and president present them. That's the checks and balances doing their thing. The output is obviously not ideal, but 'bad outcome' doesn't mean 'no checks or balances'!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
(I meant to do a bigger post about this but never got around to it) Sure, Hegseth is a "warfighter". He's still not qualified, though. I'm not talking about cheating on his wife, and cheating on his second wife, both of which blatantly violate the UCMJ, and although that's already very selectively enforced, this really can't help. Nor am I talking about his reported alcoholism (also a UCMJ issue), which many sources had claimed led to him being forced out of leading a veterans organization. Nor am I talking about allegations he abused his wife, nor allegations of sexual assault (which I don't think had enough evidence to be worth considering here anyway). All of those are modifiers - things that might make you not hire someone who you'd otherwise hire. It's just, directly, his lack of experience. Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions. There's just no strong reason to pick him instead of many other very qualified candidates. Fox news host?
I agree with criticisms of Biden's Lloyd Austin pick - he's obviously a diversity hire. When you pick the best black person, instead of the best person, you'll get a worse person, and in critical leadership positions that matters! It'd matter even without HBD, with which the best black person will usually be significantly worse than the best person. But, if you believe that, that it's very important to pick the best person, how do you get Hegseth? Austin was at least qualified:
Shortly after brigade command, he served as Chief, Joint Operations Division, J-3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. His next assignment, in 2001, was as Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADC-M), 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia. As the ADC-M, he helped lead the division's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[9] Leading the fight from the front, Austin traveled the 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad in his command and control vehicle. The division reached Baghdad and secured the city.[14][15] Austin was awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third highest award for valor, for his actions as commander during the invasion.
On December 8, 2006, Austin was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.[17] In February 2008, Austin became the second highest ranking commander in Iraq, taking command of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I). As commander of MNC-I, he directed the operations of approximately 152,000 joint and coalition forces across all sectors of Iraq.[18] He was the first African American general officer to lead a corps-sized element in combat.[15] Austin assumed the mission during the period when the Surge forces were drawing down. He expertly oversaw the responsible transition of forces out of the country while ensuring that progress continued on the ground.
Austin became the commander of CENTCOM on March 22, 2013, after being nominated by President Obama in late 2012.[37][38][39] Austin was preceded as CENTCOM commander by General James Mattis, whom Austin would later succeed as secretary of defense. In his capacity as CENTCOM Commander, General Austin oversaw all U.S. troops deployed and major U.S. military operations around the area of Middle-East and Central and South Asia. The area consisted of 20 countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon.[40]
Whereas Hegseth 'served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as civil-military operations officer' and then 'returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain' in Afghanistan. And then went into politics, and then became a Fox News host. All that should be respected, but qualify you to be secdef?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms
If average American political consumers started writing walls of text here, we would (and should) start moderating them. Doing the same to AI is fine.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think the chance is nonzero because Trump's sometimes unpredictable, but it's quite unlikely. The US has the technical ability to do it, sure, nobody outside can stop us. But it's a terrible idea politically. Just the deaths from Afghanistan withdrawal - which was a popular campaign promise - seriously hurt Biden, sending American troops to die to develop waterfront Gaza property will stop appealing to voters when Americans start dying. It cuts strongly against the 'no foreign wars' wing of the new GOP. It sounds like yet another Iraq or Afghanistan. Nearby Arab countries hate the idea, rightly recognizing it taking in millions of Gazans as a serious threat to their security and even sovereignty. And I don't think anyone other than Trump or Kushner in American politics really want it.
And all of that's a pity, because, if implemented competently, it's a great idea, and one of the only things that could properly resolve the conflict, and lead to a good outcome under liberal values. Move almost all of Gaza's population to a new area where we've built a bunch of buildings and control security and the flow of goods in and out makes suicide bombing and terrorist resistance a lot harder. And then, without a civilian population, you can obliterate whatever of Hamas remains underground with less collateral damage. Israel's Arab population proves that, whatever their average IQ, Palestinians aren't destined to be economically net-negative, so if the culture of the new settlement was managed well enough it could become self-sustaining economically reasonably quickly. This would all, of course, involve truly massive expenditures of money and manpower, and also something existing America would fail badly at if they tried, but if one really, really cares about the plight of suffering Gazans or Israeli victims of terrorism, it's the best solution. It's very unfortunate to be forced out of your ancestral homeland, but it's less bad than just dying or perpetual conflict. This is also plan moldbug.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
This is the thing I usually say about moderation, but - the problem with most AI posts isn't that they're AI, it's that they're bad. It is, in principle, possible to use AI to help you write interesting posts, I saw a perfectly good one on Twitter written with DeepSeek recently. But AI makes it much easier to quickly spit out something low-effort and uninteresting, so people do a lot of that.
The thing is, it's fine to have a rule that says 'no bad posts'. Indeed, the 'avoid low-effort participation' rule works for this purpose. So I don't think we should discourage AI overall, but just discourage using AI to make bad posts. And similarly, if someone's posting thousands of words of vacuous text every day, mods should feel free to discourage them even if it's artisanal hand-made text.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
This article presents yet another explanation
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
It's something I've heard from people who work with classified information. I'm not advocating for all that to be declassified, because it's hard for a very large bureaucracy to make precise per-document decisions about what should and shouldn't be secret, so it makes sense to classify more rather than less. But it does mean that "USAID has classified documents" isn't something you can really draw inferences from like OP did without a lot more information.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
But he undid the canada+mexico tariffs before they went into effect! I don't see how that's showing he's willing to eat the consequences.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I don't understand the claimed contradiction.
So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.
I do not see any claims that Rubio being director is illegal. Sen Andy Kim claims "This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress.", and I agree that significantly changing or removing it might be illegal, but not Rubio taking over.
Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material?
A lot of very unimportant things are 'classified'. A very small percent of 'classified material' are things that'd be genuinely bad if they got out. I don't think this is significant. The DOGE people accessing classified USAID information thing is probably similarly insignificant.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think if anything it conveys he'll back down in exchange for small concessions to avoid hurting markets? Like he could have just said 'hey, commit to doing this trade deal or tariffs go on in a month'. Instead we got this.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
The basic problem Trump/Musk have is that trying to defund government agencies you dislike isn't new. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to prevent Nixon from doing it, and the Supreme Court upheld it. If Treasury stops sending the checks, which they will imo, they'll just get enjoined and then resume sending them. More details: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/simulating-doge, he thinks SCOTUS will uphold the Impoundment Control Act if it comes to them and that seems reasonable to me.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...
I don't understand what you mean. 90 days is not 'slow and gradual'. Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades. Trump's in power for four years.
Also, under the current strategy all of Elon's big cuts have been blocked by judges, because they go directly against the Impoundment Control Act (passed the senate 80-0 in 1974 and affirmed by SCOTUS at the time), among other things. Courts are slow, 90 days is a reasonable timeframe. So the current strategy isn't actually working better.
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