rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3d ago
I'm confused as to what your claim was. I found a banned comment of yours stating that
The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.
It seems like @RandomRanger quoted it accurately enough, but source quote you provide in this comment is only very weak Bayesian evidence for this claim.
In fact, the quote you provide is much more consistent with the claim that "Republicans see class instead of race, and migrants fleeing opens up jobs traditionally taken by lower/working class citizens." No need for extra drug epicycles at all.
I may add here that the above classic Republican claim is consistent with where migrants work, but unemployment in those sectors is going up faster than elsewhere, so clearly the story is more complex.
rokmonster
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14d ago
SIS
Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1mo ago
Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now? I've been worried that the Pax Americana is coming to an end, our Republic's core can no longer maintain its security, and that the international shipping lanes are seeing a lot more instability than before. But if Trump is to be our Caesar, then we will lose our Republic well before the point when our Pax Americana breaks down.
My focus right now is in settling and raising a large family, so where to settle in Roman times? I think "in Rome" proper is out: the city saw numerous riots and insurrections during the political chaos at the end of the Republic, and one does not want one's family caught in the chaos. However, the benefits of being a citizen of Rome were vast, with increased legal rights, commercial rights, and freedom of movement, so one probably wanted to raise one's children within the Empire (Saint Paul as a citizen of Rome was able to walk all around Modern Turkey unaccosted.) One also wants the benefits of industrial civilization (toilets!), so life outside the Empire is also not recommended.
What about the provinces? It depends a lot on the province. Some of them were subject to regular warfare and raids. The marker of these was that they were highly militarized and the risk of invasion was known. The provinces in the "middle ring" of the Empire were probably the safest place to be.
The other major dangers of industrial civilization are subfertility and industrial contaminants. The cities of Rome had poorer sanitation (more plague), high poverty, and greater rates of lead poisioning. Fertility among the elites was also much reduced in Rome due to later age at marriage and smaller family size. The provincial fertility rates were so much higher that the elite became more provincial toward the time of the Late Empire.
So, what would this mean in the modern day? Avoid the core cities due to low safety and low fertility: New York, London, DC, SF. Avoid the threatened periphery due to risk of invasion: Taiwain, Poland, Korea, and states with lots of military infrastructure like Nevada and the Great Plains states (Map of Nulear complexes 1 Maps of silos and predicted fallout patterns). It looks like the winning strategy is to settle the prosperous provinces: the eastern Midwest, Southern canada, Southern France, or Scandinavia.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
The judge can order El Salavdor to comply. If El Salvador fails to comply, start seizing Salvadoran assets in the United States. Seizure of foreign nations' assets in the United States has been done before.
rokmonster
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3mo ago
Needs several large defense conglomerates to be broken up. In the 1980s there were hundreds of defense contractors. Now there are a handful.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
3mo ago
It is worth noting that for short-term travellers the US has "visa waiver business" (VWB) and "visa waiver travel" (VWT) programs. VWB can accept honoraria (montary payment) for giving guest lectures (limited to 5 presentations in a 6 month period). VWT cannot enter the country with the goal of receiving payment, but they can still give guest lectures and accept payment if the honorarium was offered and arranged after they entered the US.
I was under the impression that honoraria were a small deal, maybe $300 for a seminar (the legal limit in Korea), but the University of Washington has procedures to cover honoraria of over $10,000, and host visiting scholars for up to nine days. Maybe I need to get on the professional seminar circuit.
rokmonster
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4mo ago
One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.
rokmonster
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4mo ago
OP didn't write enough to be unambiguous, but in context this is about the OPM, which is subject to a consent decree mandating tests be pre-approved by a court before use. Does the OPM use the wonderlic test?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
So the Trump administration has made an effort to limit "indirect" research costs, those research funds which institutions charge on top of a research grant to pay for expenses which cannot be attributed to an individual research project, for items like building maintenance, grant writing staff, and administrative staff. The new policy, effective February 10, 2025, caps the indirect cost rate at 15% for all NIH grants, both new and existing. People in my social circle are watching the court battle over this with baited breath. One of their institutions charges 55%, and another one charges 70% (which appears to be the legal maximum). From this perspective, 15% seems very very low, but it appears the average is around 27%.
I recently talked to some of my Korean researcher friends, and in Korea indirect costs are capped at 17% (and come out of the allocated grant money, so they are considered during grant proposal submission). Of that 17%, the institution even sets a few percent aside to give "miscellaneous funds" to Professors. My friend (a former Resident) said that these miscellaneous funds (which are completely unregulated) were critical to keeping medical professors on the job after an anti-corruption law banned them from taking "gifts" from patients: they were frequently spent on personal items, team dinners, and alcohol. In my experience they were used to purchase high-end computers for data analysis. But the point is that 17% leaves the institution with a surplus.
I'm left wondering if indirect costs in the US (now two to four times higher than those of Korea) are a result of perverse incentives. The NIH negotiates these after grants have been granted. If the US had counted these expenses against the grant value prior to grants being granted (as Korea does), would professors have been incentivized to lobby their institutions against administrative bloat?
I tried to find how these costs have changed over time, and it looks like they have risen by a few percent in the past decade, but every grantmaking agency has different numbers and it is a mess, with more variance between agencies than change over time.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
Well, you still haven't actually read the EO.
DOGE is established as a renaming of the US digital service to US DOGE service, with a temporary suborganization called US DOGE Service Temporary Organization with teams of Special Government Employees.
And USDS's new mandate is a Software Modernization Initiative, not technically a budget directive, so the mission of USDS has not changed.
Finally, the president does have authority to share classified info with anyone at any time. The President and only the President is the ultimate classificarion authority (because classification is justified under constitutional provisions for foreign policy, I guess).
Whether this EO gives Elon the right to dismantle USAID is probably subject to controversy, but on the points you are pushing the Trump Admin has already thought of and dismissed your objections.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
Do you find you get better results that way? I always add "Please think step by step." and "Please be succinct."
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
Dictators have limited tenures. If you covertly support them via foreign aid (as opposed to direct bribery), then you have plausible deniability which enables you to continue working with whoever deposes them.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.
Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
If you are going to get the AI to rephrase something, could you ask the AI to keep it short?
The fundamental problem with AI is that it produces text very cheaply, and far faster than I can read. Thjs is the general problem of the internet, but if you write it yourself, then I know you care enough about a topic to write about it, which signals that you think it is worth your time, so I will take a look.
If you farm it off to AI, then it isn't worth your time to write, so why would it be worth mine to read?
But thank you for leading with honesty. I do respect that you respected us.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
Oh right. My bad. Let's do an estimate instead. The violent crime rate in the US is 380 per 100,000 (Wikipedia, 2022), with the most violent "state" being DC at 812 per 100,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate
Assuming deportations have not been enforced for four years and no multiple-offenders, it would take a population of 65 million illegal aliens to generate 1 million violent criminals at the US average, the base population of illegal aliens would be 31 million illegal aliens at DC's violent crime rate.
The standard estimate of illegal alien number in the US was 11 million in 2022. However, 'alien encounters' were three times higher between 2021 and 2024 than between 2021 and 2017. https://homeland.house.gov/2024/10/24/startling-stats-factsheet-fiscal-year-2024-ends-with-nearly-3-million-inadmissible-encounters-10-8-million-total-encounters-since-fy2021/
But as we learned during the VP debates, asylum seekers were not considered illegal under the Biden admin. In 2022 there were 1M applications for asylum, in 2023 there were 1.1M, and in 2024 there were 1.5M asylum applications. So that might be another 4M people.
So if I had to guess, there are 15 to 20M illegal aliens in the US at the end of 2024, which implies much less than 660k violent felon illegal aliens.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons
That number can't be right. CBP says about 20,000 per year:
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/criminal-noncitizen-statistics
Which would be about 2 months of Trump deportations at current rates.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
An app store or internet hosting service that continues to enable distribution, maintenance, or updates for a banned application could be subject to civil penalties of up to $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users who accessed, maintained, or updated the application. A foreign adversary controlled application that fails to provide user data as required could be subject to civil penalties of up to $500 multiplied by the number of affected users.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
The "TikTok" ban covers any social networking app controlled by a foreign adversary with more than one million American users, and at the discretion of the President. So if Red Little Book (the actual literally translation of Hongxiaoshu) picks up a million American users at the discretion of the President they can also be forced to sell or be forced off the app stores.
Also AFAIK this is only being kicked off the app stores and being forced to not do transact with American businesses. Existing installations will keep running, albeit with no ad revenue from American businesses.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
That doesn't look egregious. Build a fire-resistant concrete home, controlled burn the forest behind the house yearly, keep a few cisterns of rainwater in the attic to wet the ground near the home before the next fire, a generator to pump water from the pool when the power goes out, and keep a go bag ready for evac. These are relatively expensive engineering problems, but not intractable if you have the money.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this.
Unlikely. There were 80 mph (120 kph) winds before the fires started, but it was dry for many weeks beforehand without incident, which suggests to me that winds blew down power lines (or equivalently, branches next to power lines), and sparks from shorting cables are enough to get dry brush started.
Humans naturally have a tendency to search for intention in chance events, but here rumors of bad actors deflect blame from the likely cause: mismanagement on the part of PG&E and the local forest/parks service, so I expect those rumors to be encouraged in the media.
I also see people reaching for the Global Warming explanation, but to me this is a series of proximate systemic failures in administration and in holding individuals/companies accountable. Which just about captures half my complaints about the state of American governance: too much consensus-building, not enough action or taking accountability. Definitely a loss of Mandate of Heaven moment.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
Thanks. The only person I know with an EB1 works at Apple, so I assumed its usage was roughly equivalent to H1B.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
If Elon only wants 15,000 of the best of the best, then the current EB1 and O1 visa processes should be sufficient. EB1 is a green card "for highly skilled foreign workers who have extraordinary ability, are outstanding professors or researchers, or are multinational executives or managers" with a quota of 40k per year, and O1 is a three-year, extensible-until-end-of-contract nonimmigrant visa for "people with extraordinary skills" which admits about 20k per year (22,430 and 23,680 people admitted in 2014 and 2015).
So it sounds like Elon is lying, and wants more than 15,000 individuals. I presume his incentives would be in the direction of having more employer-dependent skilled labor visas like the H1B, but having a higher quota and making them more predictable (remove the lottery, approve faster). This puts him at odds with MAGA.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
Two crazy statistics to think about:
- 51% of Koreans born in 1985 (39 year olds) have never been married.
- 3% of South Koreans are born out of wedlock.
So there is social pressure to not have kids out of wedlock, and more than half the population is deferring marriage until after the fertility cliff. I blame the marriage deficit on high financial expectations on young couples and a culture which teaches that marriage at 35 or later is okay. The birthrate crisis is downstream of the marriage crisis.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
6mo ago
Korean pay scales reward seniority, not technical skills. All engineer starting pay is 1/3 to 1/5 the equivalent US starting salary, except Samsung which is 1/2.
But the US is an outlier in programmer salaries and in minimum cost of living. So someone can live comfortably on 40k USD in Seoul. Compare the US where cheap 100 to 200 sqft rentals don't exist anywhere.
Someday I need to post my student budget. I was able to save up 10k USD over three years while making less than 10k USD annually, paying tuition and living in central Seoul.
For countries which are not China, it seems that there is a bit of a "market correction" for tariffs: high US tariffs reduce demand from the US, tanking the exporting country's exchange rate to the dollar, which makes those imports more affordable, after which point the prices don't seem so high anymore even including tariffs. The Fed estimated that this feedback loop reduces the effect of tariffs by about half. Trump's recent announcement of tariffs on Korea and Japan increased the exchange rates there by about 2%, which is the TACO-inclusive correction.
In the case of China, though... well, they tend to try to peg the RMB to the dollar (although it hasn't been pegged directly since 2010), so I imagine the effect will be much worse for them.
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