pigeonburger
3d ago
more than cancelled out by not being able to say "first President to do X"
In normal times I would have agreed, but I think they overplayed that card in recent years and I think the american public just don't care anymore about hearing Democrats and the media self-servingly calling everything Trump does "unprecedented" and then doing the same shit but defending it as different. If they can the appearance of having at least a little integrity in the public eye then maybe their objections won't seem as partisan when they raise them later.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Another possibility: Joe Biden is doing his party a big service right now by letting himself become a sacrifice.
He's on his way out so there's no downside for anyone on his side to condemn and criticize him for the pardon. It gives them all a stage they can grandstand on to claim that they are the principled ones. It also increases the pressure on Trump if he wants to use his pardon on friends or family.
If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified.
As long as they're not firmly on the other side of the friend-enemy divide to the West they do need a fig leaf, as flimsy as it is, so that it doesn't become untenable for the West to be on friendly term with them, especially since it was sold to the western public after WW2 that a country committing a genocide or other atrocities is all you need to justify war with them. (I mean, there were complex reasons for WW2, but if you asked the average person, they'll say it's because of the genocide, even if it doesn't make sense chronologically).
You'd get close to equal crime rates from irrational actors. Rational actors you just need to be sure to not let the benefit of crime outweigh the penalty, but that's a relatively low bar to clear. I think there's likely very few criminals in prison who believe whatever benefit they got from their crime is worth the time spent in prison (and the criminal record). Piling on more punishment after that has very little if any effect. Increasing the catch and conviction rate, however... It would hit the behavioral conditioning that irrational actors need to get.
As an interesting anecdote, I grew up firmly believing the mantra that "crime doesn't pay" and "criminals always get caught". I mean that I believed them literally, that the police had an almost 100% rate of solving crimes. Of course as I grew up I realized it's not really the case. But it still shaped me to be a person who is almost obsessively rule-abiding. Like I have a hard time jaywalking at night when there's absolutely no one watching, I feel dumb not doing it, but when I force myself to do it, it feels like I'm going against a deeply programmed instinct. I wonder what kind of person I would have grown up to be if I had the current perception that criminals almost always get away with crime, and get caught when they're unlucky or sloppy. There's a lot of kids who probably believe that nowadays, from seeing friends and family get away with crime.
pigeonburger
7d ago
I mean, the thought experiment is comparing two extremes' effect on irrational actors, but any sane policy would adjust punishments so that it doesn't at the same time create unfortunate incentives for rational actors.
It depends what kind of criminals you're thinking about, but most of them don't do any kind of reasonned risk/reward analysis. They simply believe punishment doesn't matter because they won't get caught. It's like reckless driving; a likely result is death, the harshest punishment, but it's infrequent enough that the people doing it discount its possibility to zero. Or teens and unwanted pregnancies, even when there wasn't an easy way out, it still happened all the time because the punishment was infrequent enough as to seem unlikely to happen.
pigeonburger
7d ago
The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.
pigeonburger
8d ago
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion
Or, alternatively, are judging them on their ability to not go off-message on a public podcast.
pigeonburger
8d ago
If that's true these people must all be filthy rich now, from the prediction markets.
pigeonburger
12d ago
The universal root of horror is not death or pain, it's powerlessness. For women it tends to be loss of social power. For instance, desperately pleading to someone for help only to be ignored or dismissed, or being unable to exert any influence on others. That second one is what a lot of this "suburban 50s" genre is playing to.
pigeonburger
13d ago
My friends and I were speculating the other day how this could be improved within the current constraints of our public health system, we landed on a mix of telehealth and licensed practitionners (could be NPs) who specialise in making observations (and auscultations, etc...) for doctors to extend the amount of ailments that can diagnosed by a remote doctor.
My work insurance has as one of its perks free access to a telehealth service and it's shocking how convenient it is compared to going through the public health pipeline, when it is able to help. I'm sure it's convenient to the doctors who work through that system too.
There are not official gradations of lawyers, but it's widely understood that there are (specialties aside) bad, okay, good and fantastic lawyers, and the public has a good idea where specific levels of quality are found. They know that is all you can get is a mall lawyer, your chances are much lower (for the same quality of case) than if you could hire a prestigious law firm. Doctors associations cling to the idea that (specialties aside) doctors are essentially fungible, and this is even more explicit in countries where a public system assigns doctors to the public. Of course, this is preposterous to the public, you don't have to be a doctor yourself to spot when one is particularly good or not. Anyone with a bit of life experience has seen lazy doctors, doctors who don't listen to them and give them an obviously bad diagnosis because of it, and on the other side doctors who spotted something from hard to read symptoms. My wife recently got assigned by our healthcare system to a shifty clinic in a bad neighborhood where the clinic also advertises "natural remedy treatments" alongside having actual licensed doctors, and to our system that's good enough: to them she needed to be assigned to a clinic, any clinic, they're all as good as one another, and if she wants to switch she gets shoved to the back of the line and likely will be without an assigned clinic for 5 years. And on the opposite side, an optometrist going above and beyond speculating about the reason for me having an uveitis led to me having an auto-immune disease diagnosed and my quality of life improved dramatically.
pigeonburger
22d ago
Damn, those recommended requirements! I treated myself to what was a decently high end gaming computer at the start of 2021, with an RTX 3070 (non Ti), thinking I'll be good for a 5-6 years, and now it's already starting to fall outside of recommended requirements for new games.
pigeonburger
22d ago
The best way to fix the border is to continue to elect Republicans until it is fixed.
As much as I prefer to see Republicans in charge in the US, this creates a powerful incentive for the Republicans to find excuses not to fix the border.
pigeonburger
24d ago
I think the pay might work because it can be presented in multiple ways. Much is made in tech of the 10x engineer. Instead of saying you're going to increase salaries, say you are reducing the salary mass by replacing 10 checked-out, unmotivated, aging, inflexible paper-pushers with 1 young well-paid bureaucrat, 1 part-time tech consultant and an OpenAI enterprise account.
review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities"
Man, this article is the perfect example of how dishonest the media have become. Sure, they can fabulate that he wants to purge the brass to have loyalists for a coup, but the brass fucking lied, kept crucial information from him and undermined him the first time around. He would be stupid NOT to purge them. Biden should have purged them after he got hit by the trap they left for Trump with the Afghanistan widthdrawal.
pigeonburger
25d ago
Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce.
The pay yes, but this I'm not sure that would be a very popular move. From my understanding of them, Americans hate privilege. Even if money obviously changes everything in practice, they love the idea that they are all technically equals in the eyes of the law, of bureaucracy, etc...
To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.
And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.
As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.
Somehow in my career, I ended up being in a position to be in the room for many private conferences. One of the things that was particularly obvious to me is how human (in the worst sense) the elite "speaker" circuit is.
People imagine those kind of conferences as a meeting of powerful people exchanging important insights, but few of them were more interesting than what you'd hear on a very average TV fluff interview. Maybe one of them was at a level of discussion that would be comparable to what we have going here. In a couple of cases I even realized that I, the IT guy babysitting the tech setup, knew more about the topic than the speaker did, nevermind the attendees. Pretty much always the attendees' questions were shallow. It seemed obvious that the attendees, rich but unknown business leaders, were starstuck and enjoyed being in the same room as someone "famous". It certainly sound glamorous to drop into a conversation an aside about that time you were at a private conference of former prime ministers, VP, etc... I know I enjoy it.
In that context, Harris definitely can do that circuit if she wants. If she was just a failed presidential candidate, maybe the interest would fade fairly quickly. But I guarantee you there are lots of rich people who want to be able to say they were at a private conference of a former US Vice President, even if the presentation is just word salad about unburdening what has been. Having been Vice President, she can probably milk forever if wants.
pigeonburger
27d ago
It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.
pigeonburger
30d ago
Canada's National Cyber Threat Assessment classifies India a "state adversary"
This is likely driven by the realization with the assassination last year of a Sikh activist in Canada that India is not just a wholly subservient partner to the US world order but has its own policy goals that it's willing to defect on its "allies" to achieve.
On another note regarding that document, I find it funny how these documents are talking about how others are doing offensive cyber ops but us here? All defensive, of course.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
No, I don't think so. They've survived genuine landslides against them before (as opposed to this "slim but consistent margin against them delivering many states"). It would still be totally fair, even after this election, to say roughly half of american voters want what the Democrats are selling. There's no reason for them to go anywhere, just to do better.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday.
As far as anyone could tell bears a lot of weight here. It's not like the US flipped a coin yesterday. She had a much lower chance, we in the public just couldn't tell if the public polls were honest, artificially trying to keep it close to encourage turnout, or were afraid of predicting anything but 50%-50% because that's the safest prediction possible.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.
I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.
She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.
Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.
Well, in absolute terms sure. But in relative term he only had to be more competent than the secret service. Something that in the wake of his attempt does not seem nearly as high a bar as it seemed prior.
More options
Context Copy link