curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
Universal tariffs are words that fail the antagonism rule not a good policy fit for any reasonable goal. If you want a muscular government to intervene in the economy, actually do that. if you want to encourage manufacturing and defense production, if you want to downsize the parasitic financial economy, if you want good jobs for poor white Americans, if you want America to produce steel and ships (for shipping or the navy) and toasters and drones and nuclear power plants ... then actually do that. Subsidize specific industries. Do huge advance market commitments. Partner with a red state, eminent domain some land, rubber-stamp all the regulatory hurdles, and build those nuclear plants. Pick some startup CEO and replace the slow defense procurement process with "that guy decides". Ban imported Chinese products that infringe on domestic IP. Implement a 50% tax on hedge fund profits. Do the Yarvin where you just ban mass-produced shoes and clothing. Whatever. Those are the kind of policies that could, in principle, do the thing you want them to. One of them might even actually be a good idea. But there's an actual connection between the goal and the action, unlike with universal tariffs.
The fundamental principle behind universal tariffs is "We need to do something. This is something [we can do]. Therefore, we need do this". Way in the past, when we didn't have computers or even telegraphs and governments were less powerful, tax collection was just a lot harder, and trade with foreign countries necessarily occurred at borders and especially ports, so tariffs were the government's biggest source of revenue, so the concept of tariffs got a lot of mindshare. Later, US Congress delegated tariff power to the President as a way to negotiate trade agreements after they passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and caused a trade war. So the right's thinking about it because we did it in the based old days, and Trump's thinking about it because it's a thing he can do without needing Congress. And, if you think about it a little, there are arguments for why it'd bring manufacturing back and increase lower class wages and such, it doesn't sound that implausible. (There are arguments for a lot of things.) So, in an intellectual environment where ideas aren't exactly rigorously scrutinized, "tariff everything" does very well.
(Or, Trump got a big beautiful red button that makes everyone, especially the libs, mad when he presses it. Of course he'll press it. Why reach for a more complicated explanation?)
The thing is, the 100 year old rusty tool you found in your grandfather's toolbox isn't the best choice to fix your Tesla, or your modern economy. If you're hoping the 50% tariffs on Vietnam will bring back those jobs for working class Americans, wages and gdp per capita there are less than a tenth of America's, and 1.5 is a lot less than 10. It'll make a difference on the margin, but it won't make Americans start buying clothing made of American cloth and put together by American hands. Universal tariffs are too blunt an instrument - tariffs large enough to actually bring all the jobs back would crush the economy, because it's currently deeply integrated with the outside world. And bringing back manufacturing wouldn't even bring back manufacturing employment. Americans don't want to work for Vietnam wages, but American robots will happily work at a total cost above Vietnam wages but below American wages.
"Yes-chad", I might say to all that. Yes, I want to destroy the degenerate, consumerist, metastasized economy. Yes, I don't want cheap garbage from foreign countries. America needs harsh medicine.
Even in that case, universal tariffs still aren't the right tool. If you want such radical change, you either need buy-in from the population because of the "democracy" thing, or something like regime change. In the former case, crashing the stock market and raising prices for the garbage everyone loves just doesn't sell! Peoples' jobs depend on particular economic arrangements, companies with specific suppliers and specific markets, and in current_year many of those suppliers and markets are in foreign countries, so huge universal tariffs that last for years means a lot of people will lose their jobs. People generally don't like that. Maybe with careful state management of a transition to something closer to autarky, people could be convinced. But universal tariffs don't do that, they're a sudden shock.
So, regime change. The thing about regime change is you need a lot more support than you do to do things through the normal democratic process. Often but not necessarily from the masses, but certainly from some people. Universal tariffs destroys elite buy-in, because you're nuking their stocks and businesses. It's the kind of thing you need to do after the coup, not before it. And once you get to absolute public policy, you can hopefully more directly pursue your desired outcome.
Targeted tariffs aren't as dumb as universal tariffs. America really should make chips, and ships, in America. But if even the Jones Act isn't enough to make America build American ships, moderate tariffs probably won't be either.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
curious_straight_ca
18d 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
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
5mo ago
The post doesn't, like, say anything? I went in expecting to see some argument that some nameable factions, groups, or at least twitter usernames hold some incorrect views, in ways related to nameable outside influences. Instead he just say that the current right are mouthpieces, and have been neutered, by interests. It's all fake. All a psyop to suppress the real right wing. Whatever that is. He links a few substacks, none of which appear to address this.
It's the kind of thing anyone can agree with. All the other guys are captured, and that's why they disagree with me. And in exactly the same sense it's uninformative and useless. Even if this was true, you couldn't do anything with it, without naming what tendencies are bad and who's funding who. 375 likes is a lot for substack though!
Also, if you're gonna ban evade, can you at least make more interesting posts?
curious_straight_ca
14d 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
14d 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
3mo ago
He's still coping in that essay. If he was truly thinking rationally (which doesn't have any special meaning beyond thinking well, really), differences in height and muscle mass alone should've been enough to make him deeply question that hypothesis, and then a single search in google scholar or about men and women playing sports against each other would put the question to bed. He wasn't really being isolated from evidence by his environment, or making reasonable conclusions from evidence, he was believing it because it'd be sexist and rude not to.
(The same is true, although less obviously so, about "intelligence" being a real thing that varies a lot between individuals. It's still amazing to me how many very smart people deny it.)
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!
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?
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
This doesn't meet the effort standard for a toplevel post imo. No links, no analysis.
As far as I can tell nothing Canada or Mexico have agreed to is particularly meaningful. Mexico seems to have already had 10k troops on the border. And Canada's fentanyl czar isn't a win because we don't have a Canadian fentanyl problem. I thought the fentanyl stuff was supposed to be a pretext to renegotiate the trade agreements Canada and Mexico are supposedly screwing us on. That hasn't happened yet.
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.
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
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
5mo 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...
but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing
I actually love the principle of it! Take a competent man, maybe CEO of a successful startup, make him the CEO of the government, and have him improve it. The FDR analogy is apt. It should work.
But that requires the attribute 'competent'. Elon should be competent. And yet. I see a lot of evidence that DOGE is swinging wildly, not thinking through the consequences of their actions or how they connect to their long-term goals. The executive orders really have been poorly worded, many appear to have been hastily drafted and made with ChatGPT (even cremieux agrees with that). These were not designed to be good test cases to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on impoundment. Judges don't like seeing chaos and poorly written, immediately retracted orders in a case about extending executive power. For a smaller-scale but illustrative example, cancelling Bloomberg terminals and politico pro because people posted about it on twitter was absurd. Those things are incredibly useful, and Elon is capable of knowing that.
And, as a political strategy, it's just as questionable. You can't cut the federal budget 20% by cutting DEI contracts, you'd need to cut special ed programs, student aid, social security, medicare, the military, etc. Other than the military, all those things are good! (edit: this was ambiguous - I meant cutting all of those things, other than the military, would be good). But it's going to be incredibly difficult to cut those without Congress, that's even farther out there than cutting USAID. And Trump isn't really doing anything to appeal to the swing votes in the narrow Senate or House majorities. So we're going to get small cuts, unless something else unexpected happens. And any plausible funding bill seems likely to cut taxes much more than DOGE's savings will be. The deficit keeps increasing. Voters won't notice DOGE's savings in the noise. So all you get, in terms of building political power, are the headlines about how DOGE CUTS $100M CONTRACT FOR VENEZUELAN TRANSGENDER HOMELESS SHELTER. it's good to cut that, but nobody's going to remember it four years from now during the next election.
What I'd want to see from DOGE are things like - streamline the TSA. Build a hundred nuclear reactors on federal land. Prosecute a lot more PPP fraud. Radically restructure the NIH to fund science better. This is building! I don't expect anything like that though. (That'd take more than a few months, and Elon said he'd only focus on DOGE for a few months).
But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.
It has been tried. The thing that got us the Impoundment Control Act was Nixon impounding!
And even ignoring that, given all the above, how new is this really? This administration wouldn't be the first one to try and trim government waste.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I re-read my comment and I don't think I implied otherwise?
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.
I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
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.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/
Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
No source that unironically refers to the situation in Gaza as a genocide deserves to be taken seriously (so that throws Pasha's entire contribution in the bin).
"Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." and "Be charitable." are both rules for a reason, taking seriously the things people who disagree with you say is necessary for the kind of discussion we want here.
Social sciences are, in principle, obviously worth funding. Philosophy (Nietzsche was actually a professor of philology), archeology, digging texts out of archives and writing history rank the highest for me, but there's valuable work in a lot of fields. A lot of the best work in economics has directly affected the way we organize the economy and the way businesses do business.
90% of publicly funded 'social science' is not that. It's hundreds of millions of words of repetitive, uninspired analysis of history or literature, like the work of that Ally Louks who blew up on twitter. The thing wrong with her, contra all of RW twitter, isn't that she's too woke or too communist or anything. Michel Foucault was woke for his time, but is obviously worth reading, and thousands of leftist academics have written things worth reading across many different fields. Her work, and 90% of modern humanities academic work, just isn't. And not in the "only 10 experts could appreciate or even understand it" sense, like in research math, but in the sense that there's no interesting content in it at all. There are a hundred thousand academics at various colleges and universities who either aren't smart enough or aren't independent-minded enough to develop good taste about what to research, and are paid (although not paid very much) to write ... really anything, so long as it's topical and isn't too embarassing, and can get published in a junk journal or turned into a book chapter or something.
Now the most valuable work is very valuable, and if you had to choose all or nothing (which you don't!), the best history and economics is still worth funding the garbage. (The money isn't counterfactually going to whatever you think is valuable, it's probably going to more welfare.) Or that's what I'd say in America, but New Zealand probably has a lot less than 5% of the global top 5%, so whatever.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
What you're missing is that you found that via a conservative source that filtered the evidence to arguments that sound conservative! Here's a rebuttal from a twitter nazi who happens to be intellectually honest in this case: https://x.com/HellenicVibes/status/1882234654310453753
And there are, iirc, other sources from the time that lean in the same direction
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)
Interesting article. Let's read it.
Okay. "Erroneously deported". Maybe this is liberal media slander. Let's see where the link goes.
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"
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:
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?
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