netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
I have seen MAGA defined by putting Trump over the party; if that’s accurate, you’ll have a hard time finding Trump-agnostic MAGA Republicans. I think that definition is probably a little uncharitable, and there is some constituency who have picked up the slogan without any strong feelings about the man.
The principled MAGA perspective derives from national self-interest. Defense, trade, foreign aid: Americans as a people are selling ourselves too cheap, and should act as a people to get a better deal.
For obvious reasons, this will not be very appealing to random Europeans.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
No, I don’t know this guy.
I don’t think nukes are likely, either. This is more likely a strong filter bubble.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
“DLC” took off in the Xbox Live era, once consoles all had Internet connections. It was suddenly much more practical to sell things for prices which would never merit a physical printing. The term was perfectly reasonable until digital distribution of entire games became common.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
I’m not sure I believe that.
Every foundation that has a press release about the cuts claims they pursued substitute funding. Here is a summary of some of the big players’ actions. Those make up a big fraction of philanthropy.
I know individual giving is up, as might be expected from a year with reasonable economic growth. I don’t know where that increase is going; it’s hard to find granular stats. If somebody here has access to the full Giving USA Report which just came out, maybe they can give more details. In lieu of that, the best I can offer are pieces applauding some of the efforts to minimize the damage.
There are a lot of people out there who really, truly believe what they’re saying. I don’t think you can dismiss them out of hand.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
Americans started having smaller families in the antebellum period. From McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom:
The economic transformation coincided with—and in part caused—a change in the quality of family life as well as the quantity of children. As the family became less an economic unit it ripened into a covenant of love and nurturance of children. The ideal of romantic love increasingly governed the choice of a marriage partner, a choice made more and more by young people themselves rather than by their parents. And if wives now had a lesser economic role, they enjoyed a larger familial one. Patriarchal domination of wife and children eroded in urban areas as fathers went away from home for most waking hours and mothers assumed responsibility for socializing and educating the children. Affection and encouragement of self-discipline replaced repression and corporal punishment as the preferred means of socialization in middle-class families. These families became more child-centered—a phenomenon much noted by European visitors. Childhood emerged as a separate stage of life. And as parents lavished more love on their children, they had fewer of them and devoted more resources to their education by sending them to school in greater numbers for longer periods of time.
Now, I think that’s probably a romanticized view. More importantly, it’s focused on the urban population, where factories pull men out of the home and undercut women’s traditional industries. Families start buying a lot more textile and soap and whatnot rather than making it all day. I would expect the frontier to maintain higher family sizes, because they have much less access to those markets. But it’s not like they were low-status in this era of romanticizing the frontier. My point is that the urban middle class started to have fewer children during a time when large families were still pretty high-status. The trend reflected demand for young, unskilled labor.
My impression is that those same fundamentals held in America’s postwar transition. As our economy pushed towards service and knowledge-work instead of manual or factory labor, the value of an untrained child tanked. Hence the education treadmill, hence the general hollowing-out of factory towns and heavy industry. The marginal kid is going to cost more for longer.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Wait wait wait.
Defense startups are “raiding” the automotive industry? We’ve had the opposite problem, where automotive startups are pulling talent out of the defense establishment. I’m not sure that it extends to parts, except in the general sort of 18 month lead times that we’ve had on and off since the pandemic.
The defense startups I’ve seen tend, as always, to go for the off-the-shelf options. Sticking an arduino to the new generation of automotive sensors and so on. Or training models on rented compute, I guess? If you show up with a cheap solution to one of the outstanding issues, some branch of the DoW will be in your corner when it’s time to get it through compliance.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
I don’t recognize any of those terms. Zero-something? Negative-something?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Thank you. I saw your other comment about funding a warlord after I’d posted.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
What’s special about the American kitchen?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Fertility declines show up before that messaging. 1800s Victorians, American frontier families, all sorts of people in strong economic positions. Status can’t have been it. I would guess the biggest contributor is technological: infant mortality drops and births drop to compensate.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Yes, it’s a popular subject.
Skin and fat attenuate those radio frequencies pretty fast. There’s some literature claiming that the risks are higher for children, with their undeveloped brains thin skulls. At first glance, I’d say it’s cherry-picking. The case for reduced sperm motility has probably not replicated.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Do you actually have any examples? Because that sounds like a weak-ass excuse for using a single number.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Everything you list was implied (or said outright) in fribble’s initial complaint. I don’t know why you’re surprised that a response disagrees.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
It’s more like saying Elon Musk doesn’t actually care about space exploration because sometimes he spends money on the Trump campaign.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Are they not?
I expect donations did go up after the gutting. Messaging around them definitely did. I’m not sure how to show it, though.
Asserting that nobody cares because Obama still has money is a pretty damn isolated demand for rigor.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
I am reasonably confident that the third world was not getting an influx of smartphones before 2005; slowing growth is obviously possible without them. From his earlier article,
the first plummet transpired from about 1988 to 2005, dropping from 1.8% per year to 1.25%. After a decade’s pause, the downward trend resumed, lately averaging 0.85% per year.
That could be a problem with averaging lots of regions. Of course, it could be the pause which is an artifact. I think a general decline, concealed by regional trends in vaccination or something, is quite possible.
He’s got a more detailed graph in this article which he claims shows a 90s plateau. I’m not sure I see it. I would describe this plot as an overall “downwash” with surges in the early 90s (fall of communism?) and late 00s. That would make the post-08 crash a return to form, right?
Frankly, I’m getting a whiff of motivated reasoning from this guy. He was rightly skeptical of the UN plots which looked like regression-to-the-old-models. That skepticism should probably also apply to models which line up with his sixth-extinction hypothesis.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
I guess it’s possible. Is that cheaper than a passenger boat?
Either way, overstaying a visa would definitely be comprehensible to a Founding Father. I don’t think it’s good evidence that the Constitution has a critical security exploit.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
Please remember to avoid sweeping generalizations.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
Oh. Anchor babies. I guess I was envisioning something more…coordinated. Mea culpa.
I do take issue with the Post’s excuses for data. Look at those numbers: a nonprofit says 36,000 women in 2012. Chinese officials say 50,000, year unspecified. This Australian professor thinks 100,000, so that’s good enough, I guess.
Meanwhile the actual number of births in the Marianas is around 1,100 a year. If every single one was a birth tourist, you’d still need another 30 Saipans to get in the ballpark. I don’t trust these numbers at all.
But I’d also say they’re beside the point. Saipan’s exploits stem from its organization as a U.S. territory in the 70s. Congress still has the power to amend that relationship. The bigger potential problem is birth tourism in the states proper, which could be resolved by visa policy.
I don’t see this as a real threat.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
I had a section about that originally. He was mayor over like 10% of the population (but probably more of the gang crime). That doesn’t come with the kind of budget, or by extension firepower, of the presidency. You can look at the TCP for examples of his post-election policies.
I think he probably contributed to the overall decline; I doubt that he was uniquely effective.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
Yeah, the peak was insanity. Regression to the mean suggests that it would have gone down in the absence of Bukele. And was, in fact, going down every year.
I wish we had monthly stats for any year before 2019, because the red numbers in that year still average out below the previous year’s rate.
To be clear, I think Bukele deserves credit for continuing to bring the rate down. But he didn’t reverse any trend, and he didn’t have one weird trick. The TCP was announced late June and involved everything from equipment to public works.
I think Swedish immigration policy is even less focused. It’s all technocratic compromise politics, where a coalition government considers the recommendations of a committee on I’m already falling asleep. There’s no dynamic individual who said “yeah we’re gonna import Syrians.” Look at that spike. Policy crafted 20+ years ago for Yugoslavia getting stretched to a new extreme.
That’s what makes the Orebro situation different. Dude has none of the institutional backing and none of the existing law. His proposal is not serious.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
Suggesting that your outgroup believes stupid or evil things is a central example of waging the culture war. Don’t do this.
One day ban to cool off.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
Oh, that’s good. I know better than to make eye contact with Texas drivers. Never know who’s packing.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
What?
I think you might be the first person to envision that today. Personally, I’d rule that airlifting millions (?!) in a ploy to seize voting rights involves removing U.S. jurisdiction over whatever area. Defeating the world’s premier air power would certainly do that.
But it’s not exactly salient. How many of the existing illegals used a plane at all? Surely the founders were aware of the possibility of land crossings.
Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe. Excellent atmosphere. Remarkably likable characters, all things considered, and constantly reminds you that things are going to get weirder.
Moving on to Banks’ Inversions before I have to take it back to the library. I feel like I can see the greater structure he’s going for, but I’m not quite sure how it comes together. I think I’m benefiting from reading it right after another novel of sci-fantasy torture politics.
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