stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
26d ago
I thought the bulk of US (and, for that matter, British) rail construction in the 19th century was due to the private sector, not public works, hence the rise of the so-called robber barons.
But this doesn’t really contradict your main point: in those days, the law was written/interpreted in ways favorable to rail companies and their interests, and thus they had free rein to “build, baby, build”. Nowadays, any legislator who proposed such a pro-growth regulatory environment would be raked over the coals as a corporate shill in the pocket of Big Business.
I wish Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and the rest of the YIMBY/Abundance gang the very best of luck in threading that particular needle in California. They’re gonna need it.
Something that YIMBY/Abundance types occasionally trot out to explain the exorbitant costs, incessant delays, and general fecklessness of big infrastructure projects in the Anglosphere, especially HSR, is the idea that common law property rights and eminent domain make it exceedingly difficult for the state to claim all the land necessary for development, as every landholder bargains individually and has an incentive to hold out as long as possible for the highest price.
I have no idea if this hypothesis is true; I think the diagnosed phenomenon—viz. that English-speaking countries are terrible at building HSR, even compared to much poorer European countries like Spain and Italy—is real, but a priori my vague sense is that eminent domain considerations are at most a rounding error compared to the sheer volume of regulations that must be followed, as well as, in some jurisdictions, labor unions fleecing the unsuspecting taxpayer.
Could an Ontario to Québec railway be a natural experiment for this hypothesis? That is, since Québécois law is derived from continental-style civil law, they should, per this hypothesis, be able to build their side of the railway cheaper/faster than the Anglophones can. But here again, my vague sense is that public-sector construction in Québec (and perhaps the Francophonie in general?) is subject to even more graft and corruption than in the English-speaking world (cf. L’affaire SNC-Lavalin).
But if the project is to be carried out under the aegis of the federal government, I guess this is all a moot point.
stuckinbathroom
27d ago
People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.
Someone somewhere at an ICE field office is literally doing TPS reports. Hope they remember to use the new cover sheets.
stuckinbathroom
28d ago
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Except for Libya, none of your examples involve a regime being overthrown from within by forces wanting an end to the sanctions, or voluntarily submitting to American demands in order to end the sanctions. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all cases where the powers that be (well, were) pointedly refused to play ball, boldly stood up to American threats, and were invaded/couped in short order. If anything, they should serve as cautionary tales of what happens when you don’t play nice with America.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Tangentially related: something I recall hearing a lot from the anti-interventionist left/Ron Paul libertarian/paleocon spheres ca. 2008-2012 was the idea that sanctions and embargoes (on Iran and Cuba, at that time) are actually counterproductive to the stated goal of spreading democracy, because they provide an easy foreign scapegoat for dictators to pin their economic woes on, and the resulting “rally ‘round the flag” effect ironically gives the sanctioned regimes more domestic popular support than they would otherwise enjoy.
On the one hand, this seems like a pretty galaxy-brained take; surely, from the perspective of the man in the streets of Tehran or Havana, the more obvious conclusion is, “If our regime fell and we played ball with the Americans, they’d lift the sanctions and we wouldn’t be poor!”
But on the other, national pride is a hell of a drug, and I can definitely imagine the ordinary people of a sovereign nation—particularly one like Iran, with such a long history of being the premier regional power and a bulwark of refinement and culture—chafing at the prospect of bending the knee to foreign interlopers. Anecdatally, during the US/Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, I remember seeing assimilated, secular Persian-Americans on social media furiously condemning the US and Israel, even to the point of supporting the Ayatollah, whose very name they seldom utter without a curse before and after (cf. the old saw about not realizing “damn Yankee” was two separate words). In many cases, they were the very same people who took to the streets tweets during the anti-regime protests of 2009 and 2022!
Does anyone have any hard data on how true this hypothesis is?
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
ohh 🤦♂️ and here I was expecting a literal rhyme
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
people that rhyme with this group
Not sure if I’m being obtuse, but what contextually-relevant term rhymes with “the Motte”?
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Fair enough, I admit it may be an empty, symbolic move. But symbolism in the defense of federalism and of “laboratories of democracy” is no vice!
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I had not seen them; thank you for the fascinating lunch break reading!
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
To your point, though, I unironically want to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to having Senators be appointed by the state legislatures, as specified in Article I, Section 3. If individual state legislatures choose to devolve this power to their respective electorates directly, that is their absolute right under the 10th Amendment—and otherwise, if the voters really want a say in their state’s Senators, then they are more than welcome to vote the bums out (of the state legislature)
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
pre antebellum
Not good enough, we need to go pro-pre-ante-pen-bellum
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Physically removed, so to speak.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Indeed, if she hadn’t hit the ice, she would have hit the ICE. So to speak.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Fascinating, thanks for the summary! I gather the book does little to combat the perception that Kamala is an entitled airhead with a princess complex from having failed upwards her entire career and having never been told “no” by anyone in the Dem machine thanks to her unassailable idpol trifecta (Black, Asian, female)
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Incidentally, based on your reading, would you agree with the pithy summary that someone else here posted/quoted a while back: “I [Kamala] didn’t not pick Buttigieg because he’s gay—I didn’t pick him because he’s gay and we only had 107 days”
Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash.
Mark Koran identifies cash being funneled to radical Islamists? Nominative determinism strikes again!
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
the ever-intensifying gender war in China.
Can you tell us more about this? Has it reached South Korean levels of intensity?
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stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Not quite: the claim is that in any Turing-complete language, it is possible to write a program that cannot be algorithmically proven to halt on all inputs by another program written in a Turing-complete language.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Yep, essentially you have to give up Turing-completeness to get provable correctness: no unbounded recursion or loops allowed. To formally verify, using a Turing-complete verification language/proof assistant, the correctness of an arbitrary program written in a (possibly different) Turing-complete language is tantamount to solving the halting problem, which famously is logically impossible.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
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stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Depending on how you define “neoliberal”, not necessarily! As always the devil is in the details—I’m sure some self-described neoliberals would advocate for a measure of protectionism in industries relevant to defense and national security, for instance—but one plausible neoliberal response to a foreign country engaging in so-called anti-competitive trade practices (e.g. dumping) would be “Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
It’s a mercantilist take; as far as I know, the Austrian school has nothing against trade deficits and indeed would support even unilateral free trade.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
lol, the sigh was intended in resignation, something like “Indeed, it really has been around for a long time: at least 12 years! And wouldn’t you know it, things are no better than they were back then”, rather than an exasperated “lurk moar scrub”
Huh, TIL. Thanks for the explanation!
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