curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4mo 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
7mo ago
Prescription medications can seriously harm you if you take them in the wrong doses, or take specific different medications at the same time. And just as importantly, if you don't use them correctly they won't treat your underlying disease. The average person will not effectively treat their diseases if they manage treatment themselves, and you'd get something that looks a lot more like the supplement industry, except instead of the pills doing nothing they'll be able to seriously hurt you.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
If you're making a post about a link, please actually link it.
Scott clearly still has some of the progressive aversion to harming criminals even when it's positive sum. However, he's still right (reality is complicated, you can be wrong about one thing and right about a different more important thing).
This is his final, bolded conclusion: "Prison is less cost-effective than other methods of decreasing crime at most current margins. If people weren’t attracted by the emotional punch of how “tough-on-crime” it feels, they would probably want to divert justice system resources away from prisons into other things like police and courts."
This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.
The biggest problem with fighting crime isn't that prison sentences are too low, it's that the police and justice system - in large part due to progressive activists, but in even larger part due to general government stasis and lack of ambition - has gotten worse at policing. They should'v gotten better at policing at a pace matching the advance of technology! Crime could be so much lower than it is today with just a bit more proactive policing, use of computers, and shaping of culture.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in
Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers
curious_straight_ca
5mo 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
4mo ago
And what would that accomplish?
... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Fortunately for Trump's chances, the party's rapidly coalescing around Harris, with 125 endorsements from house democrats and a lot of state dems and delegates endorsing Harris. Dems weren't willing to rock the boat with the last terrible candidate, and when the debate forced them to notice, they immediately make the same mistake again and pick the obvious "consensus" candidate who happens to be mediocre. I'll again post How Democrats Got Here
Harris had just mounted an exceptionally lackluster bid for the presidency. Then a California senator, Harris had entered the race for the Democratic nomination with strong donor support and an early surge in the polls. Despite these early advantages, Harris failed to maintain — let alone build out — her coalition over the ensuing months, and her campaign collapsed before the primary’s first ballots were cast. Nor was Harris’s electoral track record before 2020 especially encouraging. She had never won an election in a swing state or competitive district. And in her first statewide race in deep blue California in 2010, Harris defeated her Republican rival by less than 1 percentage point. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had won that state by more than 23 points.
Given that Biden was 77 in August 2020, the likelihood that his running-mate would one day become his party’s standard-bearer was unusually high ... Biden’s primary consideration in choosing a running-mate should have been his or her electability. Instead, he put enormous weight on demographic considerations. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman,” former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times in the summer of 2020. “They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.”
On Polymarket, Harris's chance of winning is 30%, to Trump's 64%. Trump was up 71% right after the debate. Better than Biden's conditional probability of 25%, and Harris'll probably go up a bit when she gets the nomination, conditionally that's 35% but while that's better than Biden's 25%, it's not a great outcome for dems.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask
it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes, and it's very reasonable and useful
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
IMO memecoins are significantly worse than expensive collectibles because they allow, and the community encourages, normal people who aren't that smart or careful with their money to put in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions into these coins, and then to attempt to dump your bags on other people who are more gullible and less quick before the price drops. And the creator's taking a cut of all that.
curious_straight_ca
5mo 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
6mo ago
Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.
"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
How have we not discussed the nuzzi/RFK drama yet?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
We can use observed evidence to distinguish between the two scenarios. Did OPM have the authority, either formal or practical, to ask for this? Is this normal or unusual?
Well:
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff were initially told to reply but then received a Sunday evening email asking them to "pause" responses pending additional guidance. Late Monday, a third email told employees, "There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond."
That includes the State Department, where a senior official told staff that the department would respond on its own behalf, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR. "No employee is obligated to report their activities outside their Department chain of command," the official's email said.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright also asserted his department's authority to manage his staff in a message to employees on Sunday that NPR has seen. "The Department of Energy is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures," Wright wrote. "When and if required, the Department will provide a coordinated response to the OPM email." His email used identical language to a message sent by the Defense Department the same day and also seen by NPR.
Some of the most high-profile federal agencies ended up bucking Musk’s demands, with the Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy all telling staff not to respond to the email.
Elon Musk, who recently threatened federal workers with termination if they did not respond to an email asking what work they completed in the last week, said Monday workers who did not reply will get another chance to do so at President Donald Trump’s “discretion”—the latest development over the emails after a growing number of agency heads, including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, told their employees not to respond.
I don't think you'd see this if this wasn't unusual and strange.
Also, the thing where Elon tweeted people would be fired for not responding (and the recent second chance), but that wasn't actually in the e-mail - and the combination of Elon's threat of firing, the ambiguity about his power to do that as the leader of DOGE, and the shifting and differing guidance in replying between agencies - is terrible management, and I think demonstrates that Elon does not have a careful plan and is not acting with a huge amount of competence in this case. He's not acting like a strong leader, he's not establishing that his orders are followed - he's creating an image of someone who's a bit unstable, who's lashing out, claiming more power than he actually has. If you actually want Elon to control the government, stuff like this doesn't help!
It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught
The assumption for the hypothetical is that you're caught every time. It's a slap on the wrist, but you can't actually benefit! So organized small groups stealing over and over wouldn't pop up, because they wouldn't benefit from it. That example was specifically for shoplifting and stealing cars. My argument is they would go down, because you wouldn't actually be able to benefit from doing them anymore. It wasn't intended to apply to rape or fraud. I don't really think there's much you can do about rape on current margins, absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times, and fraud's a whole different thing anyway.
curious_straight_ca
5mo 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
5mo 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
8mo ago
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I didn't really believe the story initially just on base rates of wild twitter claims that end up being true. I thought it was plausible, though - rural cultures separated from ours could easily not view cats as a 'cute cuddly pet' but as more of an edible or farm animal, and there are almost a million Haitians in the united states, so I think that it's significantly more likely than not that one Haitian has killed someone's pet, and very plausible that some have eaten pets. (Of course, this means the cat-eating tells us precisely nothing about how problematic Haitians are as immigrants). And in the rufo video, I'm pretty sure that's not a store-bought whole chicken, because that's just not what they look like, although it probably wasn't a cat either. I feel like this in particular doesn't change my views much, in that I think something like that probably/plausibly happened depending on details but any individual case probably didn't. "no bones or fur around the meat", only evidence being cat going missing and her suspicion, and other context clues feel to me like this is fake, but dunno.
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?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.
The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work
What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.
The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.
IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.
(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)
This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
The minute, or hour, after he posted it was definitely a good time to buy SOL. Now ... probably still is a good time, but not necessarily because of Trump, more because the momentum in the crypto ecosystem seems to be behind it.
But this entire exercise illustrates how, IMO, speculative cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum, socially useless activity that should be at least shameful, if not illegal. Your profit on SOL or BTC isn't coming from 'transforming the financial system', it's coming from the kind of people who are buying Trumpcoin. That's not to say that cryptocurrency overall is bad, blockchains are cool and the current crypto financial system has a lot of advantages over tradfi by virtue of being native to modern tech, but that doesn't justify the speculation.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Trump is not popular! His approval/favorability is terrible compared to past presidential candidates. He's only winning the election because Dems managed to nominate someone worse. Kamala isn't eighty, she can say more than ten words in sequence without pausing or stuttering. She's not a good Dem, but she's still just a mediocre generic Dem, and that's good enough for a lot of voters.
Donald Trump launched a shitcoin!. Trump Memes - $TRUMP - on Solana. It has a market cap of $5B, comparable to actual company $DJT, and a fully diluted value of $29B. For those who are unfamiliar, a 'shitcoin' or 'memecoin' is a term for a tradeable token that lives on a blockchain, like Ethereum or Solana, that doesn't make a claim to have value or future profits, and whose price relies on a large number of retail traders who think it'll go even higher, or that it's funny. Trump Memes joins coins like Shiba Inu, Fartcoin, Pepe, and Dogwifhat, and is now #4 for market cap. They function to redistribute huge amounts of wealth from gullible crypto enthusiasts to the token developers, smart traders, and people who happen to see it first. And, of course, 80% of all Trump tokens that exist were allocated to the coin's developers, locked up for some time period.
FT: The president-elect of the US is promoting a shitcoin?
Is this good for crypto? It doesn't hurt to have a friendly President - Trump and his team were embracing crypto, planning crypto-friendly executive orders, designating it as a 'national priority', and even seriously considering a 'strategic bitcoin reserve'. It might be bad, in the long run, though - it's the perfect setup for the next Dem administration to crack down on crypto. Or even a bipartisan crackdown, especially once Trump is too old to be politically relevant, or just dead from old age, and the grip of his personality over the Republican party is gone.
And, what a thing to do a few days before your inauguration. As much has people do irrationally hate Trump, I kind of buy the liberal claim that, because we all know Trump is corrupt and depraved, and the way in which he is so is incredibly funny, people don't hold him to the same standards they'd hold their political enemies, or anyone else. Joe Biden's done a lot of bad things, but if he blatantly scammed his supporters for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, the response from his allies would be a lot stronger!
I don't like the impersonal process-oriented bureaucracy, the expert elite, the oligarchy behind democracy, whatever you call it. They are hypocritical, corrupt, dysfunctional, whatever else. But they're not infinitely that. Society still more or less works. If the alternative (whether that's just more MAGA candidates winning elections, or a moldbuggian new regime) is concentrating power in strong individuals, and this is the kind of individual that smart right-wingers - empirically - chose to concentrate power in, is that really better?
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