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curious_straight_ca


				

				

				
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joined 2022 November 13 09:38:42 UTC

				

User ID: 1845

curious_straight_ca


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 13 09:38:42 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1845

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I had really hoped Vance was smarter than this. If he was baited into it he shouldn't have bitten and if it was intentional then he should have known better.

Why do you think it's a blunder? This is the classic politician move, if you're asked about a losing issue, just deflect. It sounds bad, but it's less bad than actually addressing the question. There's a reason they all do it. It distracts, it muddies the waters a bit. My opponent's asking me this ridiculous question to distract from Border Czar Harris's invasion of migrant criminals and nation-destroying inflation et cetera.

Assuming he can't say "yes" because Trump won't let him, what else should he say?

The real blunder is that Trump won't just shut up about the election and let Vance say he'd certify. People who care about Trump saying the election is rigged are voting for him anyway. There's no harm in just lying here.* I have to imagine Trump and the people around him really believe it!

* obviously it's bad and corrosive but i'm taking the perspective of political strategy here, and they all lie (sorry, strategically take positions) anyway

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.)

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.

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 mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.

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!

It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror

It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness

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.

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.

I'm not sure the concept of 'status' as this drive we semi-unconsciously pursue adds any explanatory value. The reason that having kids isn't 'high status' anymore is that the moral values we hold and express have shifted away from ones that name having children and a family as a duty, and a good, to ones that name 'freedom' from the coercion of patriarchy as a good. So if people are having fewer children, it's because they value them less. That it's higher status in Amish and Haredi communities to have children is just a direct consequence of them valuing children more! A reasonable number of people in liberal communities have two children, and some have 3+, because they, personally, value it, even though it's 'low status'.

I think removing that layer explains why this is harder than the government merely telling citizens they should have children - the reasons we value children less are very deep ideological ones tied with the growth of liberalism and progressivism over the past few centuries. And the reason the government isn't doing that is because the people in government, and the voters, don't value having more children. If everyone (or even all elites) valued having children as much as you or Elon do, the game would already be over!

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.

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

Come on, are we really supposed to believe that every new account with only a few past comments that makes a post about some dissident right current thing, from the perspective of a liberal, who definitely disagrees with the thing he's posting, and that always writes with the same tone, are all unrelated? This doesn't happen for any other topic.

I dunno, government shutdowns due to ineffective governance and republican infighting sounds exactly like the first Trump administration. Springing this on congress a few days before the deadline when they thought they had everything worked out isn't a great way to introduce your administration, they hate working holidays. And it doesn't work as a show of power if you don't get your desired bill through, it just looks uncoordinated and capricious.

Now is in fact the best time to post some LLM junk, given nobody'll read it! Asking an LLM to make a post for you just does not pass the effort rule.