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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   23015 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.

None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.

Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.

In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.

At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.

Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".

Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.

driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".

Yes, because we don't need immigrants to work our jobs. We have no shortage of Americans willing to work. What we do have a shortage of are Americans who are willing to be underpaid, which is why companies love foreign labor so much. They are willing to be treated like slaves.

One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Yes, because we don't need immigrants to work our jobs. We have no shortage of Americans willing to work. What we do have a shortage of are Americans who are willing to be underpaid, which is why companies love foreign labor so much. They are willing to be treated like slaves.

Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizens with no employment prospects who are perfectly happy and able to start any work again, yet alone backbreaking labor like dealing with farms in the south, and how are they currently living without any pay? The main groups out of the work force are either old, in college (and thus entering soon!), disabled, or in between employment because layover/hiring cycles means there's always some left just like how housing vacancies will (and should) always exist.

Even if we want to discuss the relatively few working age NEETs or mentally ill homeless addicts or whatever, I don't think they're gonna start picking up a hoe because you pay them a little more.

  • -12

Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now. It use to be 95% or higher doing economic expansions. So we have millions of men not working right now in America.

There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.

Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now.

Same as 1990s levels. You've got to really far back to post war economic booms to get the higher levels you're citing.

There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.

Sure, we could count all those but those aren't really "people who are looking for a job and can't get one", they're people who don't want a job and won't be happy if you cut them off from what they currently got. The military man with a 3k a month disability check is happy where he is, even if he is a parasite.

These are not examples of the supposed hordes of men wanting work that can't get any because the jobs are stolen.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S

The data doesn’t agree.

Oh yeah sorry, I was thinking of the general prime age labor rate which is at 90s levels, males have gone down a little.

However, we know the reasons why and we know that they don't want jobs and their problems are not because jobs are lacking

https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/whats-behind-declining-male-labor-force-participation

While many observers assume that increasing inactivity rates reflect more men “dropping out” of the labor force out of frustration with the job market, relatively few prime-age inactive men fit the picture. Just 3 percent meet the official federal definition of a “discouraged worker,” and in 2014 just 7 percent of prime-age men inactive the entire preceding year said their reason for not working was that they could not find a job. The increase in their ranks accounted for just 9 percent of the rise in full-year inactivity from 1968 to 2014.

Few inactive men say they want a job in a typical week, and most of the increase in inactivity has involved men who do not want a job. This study estimates that only about one in four inactive men in 2014 wanted a job, and only about 25 percent of the increase in inactivity in a typical week from 1969 to 2014 involved men who wanted a job. Less than one-third of non-disabled inactive men want a job.

Again there is not a horde of American citizens who want jobs but can not find them. These inactive men do not want jobs, because they're disabled or caretaking or whatever.

Of the few who do have trouble finding it, well they're mostly just shit and that's why they can't. If you've ever done hiring for any lower level position you might have seen a few of them yourself, the people who you will simply never hire. Lazy addicted losers who won't show up on time or pay attention to their work no matter what you do, the type of person who gets themselves fired from fast food or door dashing. The dregs of society are the bottomfeeders not because of the 1% wealthy or immigrants or whatever other scapegoats, but because they're shit and can't even tear themselves away from drugs long enough to hold an interview.

Am I taking crazy pills - “7% of men saying they aren’t in the labor market is because they can’t find a job”. That’s a huge amount of men.

The job market sucks. I’ve worked for prop trading firms and they can pay extremely well. And I went thru a period of burn out or perhaps something like YIPs in baseball. I couldn’t hit a fastball anymore and make money and needed a break. So I looked for opportunities. Even with solid degrees (Ivy engineering + M-7 MBA and prior top performer) no one would even interview me.

Now I’ve rebuilt a solid 3 year track record and it seems like I can hit a fastball again. So I guess that’s better than taking a job, but I would still consider the right opportunity at a reasonable salary for economic security. In my experience the anecdotes are true and I have zero idea how I could add more valuable traits. The traits I have are elite. The anecdotes of a lot of people saying the job market sucks appears to be true.

Am I taking crazy pills - “7% of men saying they aren’t in the labor market is because they can’t find a job”. That’s a huge amount of men.

Not 7% of all men. 7% of those not in the labor force. Almost all men who want to work can get jobs, of those without jobs they don't want to work to begin with.

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Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizen

In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}. One of the largest employers in the area has historically been a prepared food facility, which recently came under new management. This new executive team has been doing rolling waves of layoffs, and regularly furloughing workers who they retain an attempt to force them to quit. For the last year, both a relative and a friend have repeatedly noted that despite the rolling layoffs, the overall workforce at the plant has not decreased. It has, however, started to feature an increasingly large number of five foot tall Guatemalan men in their 20s who don't speak English, but present work papers claiming that they're John Billings from Madison, Wisconsin. It's agonizingly obvious that they're hiring people with stolen identities.

My cousin got laid off recently, and he's looking at trying to file some sort of suit against the company. I doubt it will go anywhere. He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.

You're welcome to pretend this is all about "jobs nobody wants to do", but believe me when I tell you it's climbing up the food chain.

In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}.

As another commentator pointed out, unemployment rates don't match and if you go back historically they've never really matched, unemployment has never been all that high except for temporary disruptions with obvious causes like Covid or the recession. Maybe your family and old acquaintances are unlucky anecdotes, but they are absolutely not representative of the general economy in any way.

This ain't a conversation to be had with individual anecdotes but with data and statistics, and what those suggest is that there isn't some massive amount of capable American job seekers who are unable to find employment.

He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.

Maybe it is the drug charges, maybe it's more than just the drug charges. Sometimes terrible employees do exist and they will obviously lose out to better alternatives. It's what happens.

I will not hire a bad employee in my department simply because I feel bad for them, and no one else will either. Businesses want efficient and lean workplaces so we can compete for customers, we are not charities.

  • -12

It’s impossible to get a job now. I had some business failings a few years ago. Tried to find a reasonable pivot to survive and not blow my savings. With 2 Ivy equivalent degrees I did the apply to anything on LinkedIn and think I submitted 5k applications. Maybe 3 interviews. Luckily business is now going well but it’s basically impossible to get a job.

It’s why there is a huge increase in left the labor market that isn’t showing up in the official statistics. I have no idea how to get a job in this environment especially if you need to do any kind of career pivot. It actually scares me a lot if business goes bad again that I would be able to find something to survive on. I guess I could work at McDonalds.

Let me repeat myself here

This ain't a conversation to be had with individual anecdotes but with data and statistics

Sorry you can't find something, but the problem is probably with you. Often what I see from people who "can't find a job" is what they actually mean is "I can't find a high paying office email job", which if that's the case it means you probably need to accept reality and lower your standards for what you apply to.

I guess I could work at McDonalds.

Yes. If you aren't good enough to compete and win the high paying email jobs, then you work at McDonald's or whatever else. If ego and actual ability don't match, you either lower your ego or raise your ability. The former is way easier.

Dude I’ve been paid 7 figures multiple times. It’s not a skills issue. They don’t even interview or phone call white men.

And the statistics agree with me. Labor market participation rate is crashing.

And as Bezos says when the anecdotes and the data disagrees trust the anecdotes. But the data also agrees with me.

Sometimes terrible employees do exist and they will obviously lose out to better alternatives. It's what happens.

I will not hire a bad employee in my department simply because I feel bad for them, and no one else will either.

Are you claiming that @birb_cromble's cousin is (or would be) a terrible employee, apropos of nothing besides the fact that he's sent out thirty job applications with no success?

A person who gets fired and then can't find another job of any sort within a few months typically has something going on with them. Maybe he's too picky and trying to get a job he's not qualified for, or maybe he's just really bad at doing interviews, or whatever. I don't know.

But basically everyone else manages to get employment. Long term unemployment doesn't really happen unless you either choose it or have something going on with you.

I know it's not the point of your post, but I just want to say that I've always found the whole "jobs nobody wants to do" argument infuriatingly obtuse and borderline offensive.

While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing" that is kind of what they are implying. What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily because {dirty job} is sub-human.

What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job}

I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.

A reasonable point, but at the same time my reply to you would closely mirror your reply to @SophisticatedHillbilly about socially necessary jobs.

Some jobs are just naturally undesirable, and by extension "low status". There are a lot of people who will object to a "low status" (undesirable) job paying more than a "high status" (desirable) job on basic principle because in their minds money is a proxy for status. That in turn feeds into the question of whether you can hire a sufficient number of sanitation workers in a world you are neither willing to pay them a middle class salary nor are you willing to shoot and/or starve them.

Yeah no doubt people will object to that, I just think the market will override their objections barring infinite cheap foreign labor. People will pay out before they’ll go without running water.

That doesn’t really make sense though. There is always a wage people will take to do dirty jobs (I would do them instead of my profession if the dirty jobs paid better) so leaving that aside is the economy argument. Your argument is basically an argument against paying any job a high wage. Trucking simply must be done. The economy must bear whatever labor (or automation when that becomes fully viable) cost is required to make the trucks move. If that is $100/hour for entry level truckers, then goods will become more expensive and that cost will be distributed across the economy accordingly. This will make all other people in the economy poorer, and it will make truckers or whatever other dirty-job-doers richer. It would also increase the quality of talent in those positions, resulting in efficiency gains (but probably somewhat lower gains than the cost increase). I think the reality is people just don’t want to see meatpackers and truckers making significantly more than they make with an email job and a degree .

That’s how any high paid job works. Doctor is a difficult-to-fill position, and so is paid highly, which makes all other people in the economy marginally poorer by increasing their expenses. If doctors were willing to work for 20$/hour, everyone else would be better off. They don’t do that, but maybe they would if we imported 1,000,000 foreign doctors and put them to work.

What is infeasible is any one company paying high wages for dirty jobs when there is a pool of cheap labor available due to competition.

Your argument

For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.

That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.

I agree it’s not a trivial question, but I do think the answer is a clear yes. There’s a pretty large portion of the population that isn’t built for knowledge work and loves money. It does have to beat out the living-on-benefits life which is pretty good.

The snobbery is one part, but I suppose there is a degree of understandable anxiety around what a world might look like where the salaries of sanitation workers and knowledge workers get reversed or even reach parity. It is deeply contrary to blue-tribe values I think.

For the record I do not think that "even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies" so much as I suspect that there are a lot of people here who would object on principle to the idea of sanitation workers being well-paid.

While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing"

Slavery was economically inefficient, as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, and many other early capitalist/capitalist aligned thinkers would point out. And therefore anyone who tried to argue "the economy is why the abolition of slavery is a bad thing" would be incorrect from the very start.

A free market of goods and labor however is economically efficient, and therefore any protectionist argument against that has to showcase why any claimed moral gains are worth the economic tradeoffs. There might be some things where that's true, but they aren't the same.

do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily

They are doing it voluntarily. It's just that they are voluntarily doing it for wages that some people believe are too low. It's basically "the myth of consensual employment".

But when a lot of these immigrant subsidies programs come with implied PR or citizenship pathways the work is massively overpaid not underpaid.

If I get a UK care worker from Nigeria at 10k GBP a year below prevailing rate for 5 years, but the government allows them ILR and a potential passport after that 5 years the latter is worth millions of pounds in benefits. Especially if there's any sort of family reunification at play. If anything the majority of foreign low skilled workers in the West are being massively overpaid due to their potential to get citizenship

You know what drives me apeshit? I've worked on a dairy farm, and an orchard. Sure, it's hot, dirty, and uncomfortable work, but it wasn't really any worse than a dinner rush in a commercial kitchen on a Friday night. I really get the impression that a lot of people assume manual labor is worse than the ninth circle of hell.

I don't think that's what they are implying, they mostly see it as a way to imply white people are too lazy, and since those mean right wingers won't let them import hundreds of millions of better, hardworking brown people permanently and legally then they have to settle for bringing them illegally or temporarily. The lack of legal protections afforded to legal residents is only a feature in so far as it enables them to enlist the help of capital for this venture, they don't like it either.

Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low, but there doesn't need to be a mass of currently unemployed American citizens out there for immigration to depress wages.

As I argued in the comments of the linked post back in January, companies like Amazon and Tyson foods can easily weather things like Tariffs by simply passing the cost on to the consumer, but forcing them to pay American-level wages and provide American-level working conditions is much harder them to shrug off as it provides opportunities for other operators to start competing on cost and/or pick up market share.

It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa.

Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low,

Then historically there is a shortage of Americans who are willing to work but currently don't. Which is the claim being made here.

It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa

Of course it's classic supply and demand, more supply of labor (whether through automation or immigration or whatever) means cheaper labor costs. This also of course can mean products are cheaper and more available to buy as products become easier and cheaper to create. Immigration isn't as strong as automation since immigrants also consume (contribute to demand), but for very specific sectors where they cluster labor prices get driven down.

It's the inverse logic of why unions drive prices up and make stuff less affordable and less accessible to the average American. It's great for the union workers who get to hold the country hostage, it's bad for everyone else. Regulatorally enforced high labor costs benefits those who do labor by taking from those who need the labor done, like with elevators. Maybe it's a tradeoff we want to make, disabled people like the author, apartment dwellers, etc get less elevators in exchange for the elevator union having higher pay, but it is a tradeoff.

Same way that maybe we'd rather prefer American citizen construction workers get paid a lot of money over providing cheaper housing to our youth and our poor, we can make that tradeoff, but it is unavoidably one.

The catch here is that the “our youth and our poor” here would also largely be the people working these construction jobs, and all other jobs that now have the depressed wages. Easier to afford a $300,000 house on 40$/hour than a $200,000 house on $20/hour Not to mention that land is generally the largest price factor in housing, so the labor cost increase wouldn’t do that much anyway.

Easier to afford a $300,000 house on 40$/hour than a $200,000 house on $20/hour

Your numbers are completely fictional though, the change in prices for buyers must be directly equal to the change in price for sellers. If I have a rare trading card and want to sell to a collector, the price is the same for both parties. If I make more, he must spend more. If he spends less, I must make less.

Even subsidizing the buyer just means a third party must take on the burden instead, it doesn't eliminate the problem. The only real world actual fix to have us both win (more than mutual trade already wins) without any losers is increasing productivity efficiency, devising ways to get two out of what previously only made one, like with agricultural science and food, or the economy of scale or ending artificial constraints on efficiency like regulation.

Increasing efficiency is the best way for sure. That’s unlikely to occur when extremely cheap labor is available. Besides, the increase in production would still result in the problem you pointed out: super efficient home building results in lower appreciation for existing homeowners. They lose in your scenario.

The numbers are fictional but the price on any given product would increase by less than the % gain in pay, as pay would not be increasing for the entire buyer-side, but only a portion, benefiting those being paid more at the expense of buyers who did not receive a pay increase. Sellers would win out, as in the made up numbers, but so would the now-better-paid workers.

Regardless yes markets are two sided, but the point here was addressing the “young and the poor.” Both of those groups could afford houses if they were being paid much more. The best houses in the best places? No, but most people don’t live in the 5 trendy metro hubs, and they still wouldn’t.

No, the claim being made here is that the labor shortage and associated rise in wages is a bad thing and I am disagreeing. I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately change tack when it comes time to actually pay those wages.

I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately

Those things are bad and distortionary, any hypocrisy aside doesn't change it. This is a tautological statement: "Higher prices means higher prices". If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.

It is unsolvable, just like the housing market or any other. It is literally impossible for the seller of labor/homes/etc to make more money and have the buyer pay less. You must make a tradeoff when meddling.

In the long run the government is typically subsidizing these industries via providing a settlement pathway to foreign workers at the bottom end. A green card or a Western passport is worth considerably more than any tenure of unpleasant work and that cost will eventually be repatriated from taxpayers

If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.

Yes, and?

Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad?

Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad

The second one, a "living wage" is a meaningless phrase. Especially in the US, where the only thing that can't be easily accessed even the poorest 10% of Americans, housing, is not because of a lack of pay but because of deliberate political decisions to restrict new supply.

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One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Traditionally, I believe communists were against mass immigration for this very reason. By all means spread the revolution to the rest of the world, but do not import cheap labor as it only benefits the business owners. Supporting immigration is a relatively new thing, and one that is mostly rooted in the belief that rich countries have a duty to help poor people, whereever they may be. It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion. If someone is suffering and we can do something to help, it becomes a moral duty. If it requires sacrifice then so be it. Especially when people are literally drowning trying to reach our shores.

It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion.

More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.

The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:

Time: Don't Blame Rescue-at-Sea Organizations for Migrants Coming to Europe

When 22-year-old Mohammad left Libya’s coastline in a decrepit wooden boat headed for Italy in August, he had no illusions about where he would end up.

Unlike many smugglers in Libya who lure clients in with false promises of reaching Europe within hours, his agent was brutally frank. It would take about three hours to reach international waters, he explained. Once there the boat would drift until spotted by one of the humanitarian rescue vessels plying the central Mediterranean, at which point he and his fellow passengers would be taken aboard and transferred to Italy, where they could apply for asylum.

This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.

How much better are the conditions of the sort of mobile, young, typically-male 'asylum seeker' who has the resources and gumption to chain migrate halfway across the world. There's not that many countries left where there's genuine daily mortal peril, even if there's a lot where the local economy is Ennui and meh.

Morocco is currently in the news for the Spanish invasion. I've been to Morocco, I've got Moroccan friends (albeit heavily filtered to upper class/resources to get to Asia) and like I sympathize with the complaints of the average working class Moroccan 20 year old that they feel minimal hope, corruption is rife and it's hard to work within the domestic system. However, they're also not desperately poor (outside of a few marginal outlying areas where the attempted immigrants are decidedly not coming from), they have food and they have a reasonable life expectancy. They might be way behind in terms of GDP per capita but the difference between $12k PPP and $60k PPP is not a 5x life quality improvement.

Aside from the fact that low skilled workers are considerably less well off than the typical Spaniard.

That too. Going from upper middle of the developing world to being a Deliveroo drone might increase your savings rate but could easily be a short term deterioration in living conditions

If they are literally drowning, that is a risk they took of their own accord and it is entirely their fault. No one's forcing them to do that, and we especially are not forcing them to, so it's not our problem.

Indeed, a self-induced emergency on your (the general “you”) part does not constitute an obligation my my part, especially when saving you from your own emergency means me continuing to payup and get criminalized.

At the end of the day, a majority believes in Newtonian Ethics. People may mostly be indifferent to people dying somewhere in Africa, but they tend to care if the same people try to reach Europe and bother us by drowning close to our shores.

In the case of Mediterranean boat people, nobody cares about the (relatively small number of) drownings except as a legal weapon. Under normal circumstances, it is a crime to put people who do not have permission to come to Italy on a boat and take them to Italy. But if the reason why you put them on the boat is that you were rescuing someone who was in peril at sea, then it isn't.

My understanding is that a lot of work goes into calibrating the number of Mediterranean migrant drownings to the bare minimum needed to keep the people running the migrant-trafficking NGOs out of prison.

A modest proposal to unite the country (against me): Ironclad union laws, and scabs are made illegal... unless the scabs are undocumented immigrants, who will be given visas and (by law) permanently replace the striking workers 1-for-1 on payroll at their jobs if brought on to work.

Because the DSA membership will never, ever, drive a truck, or work construction, or do any blue collar labour at all. They might wait tables, sure. But that's a different social stratum, and one that immigrants aren't super successful in, the way they are in trucking and construction.

One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Because the people leading the charge on this are upperclass failsons and failed creatives, perpetual grad students and surplus low-midwit knowledge workers. The immigrants driving UberEats and hanging drywall aren't competing with Mamdami in the rap game, or getting lucrative contracts for shit-tier art that should have gone to his wife.

The common term for such people being "downwardly mobile".

the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial divers licences

TIL commercial diving is so lucrative for immigrants...

(You have a typo there)

Good eye.

I'm more concerned about the English pruriency requirement...

To be fair, that attitude would help a lot in gaining English proficiency. Just look at weeaboos.

It is notoriously the main way the more trad British public schools motivate the boys to learn Latin. Something like Suetonius' account of Nero's vices can be read in a scholarly translation, but if you want to someone to let you read Catullus as a schoolboy you are probably reading in in the original Latin. Rated "C" for classical.

Not that I ever saw. Reading about cool battles, yes. What are you thinking of?

I dropped Latin before they started reading Catullus, but among his more notable works (all of which were pored over by my classicist friends) were:

  • A Latin translation of Sappho's Greek "lyric poetry" (this is what classicists call it in learned academic journals, but there is a reason why the old-fashioned term for lesbianism is "Sapphic love")
  • His own erotic poetry about his sexual desire for teenagers of both sexes
  • Invective against his political opponents including sexual innuendos. (The modern equivalent of calling your political opponent a pigfucker, but with more poetic description of the physical qualities of the pig).

Suetonius is the primary source for most of the modern stories about sexual perversion in Ancient Rome. The description of Tiberius' BDSM exploits (he was a sexual sadist to the point where I find him sick, and I'm not exactly innocent here) is the most explicit part - the discussion of Caligula and Nero is mostly a list of who he did and where.

I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?

For instance, with the English language requirements for the trucking licenses, they were in power from 2017-2021 and could have done it then, and they could have done it last year too. Are they too busy? Do they not know about the regulations until someone brings it to their attention? Is it very difficult to change regulations like these and therefore they wait for an opportune time to do it?

I would say all of the above, plus the fact that non-domiciled CDLs/chameleon carriers were much less of an issue in Trump's first term.

Like many things to do with immigration, it seems that non-domiciled CDL requirements were systematically not enforced by certain states post-2020, resulting in rapid growth of a previously obscure category of license (A non-domiciled CDL is a CDL issued to someone who doesn't live in the issuing state.). Illinois, for example, went from issuing 300 non-domiciled CDLs in the year 2020 to issuing 5,000 of these per year in 2024 and 2025, with non-domiciled licenses comprising 40% of all licenses issued in 2025.

Toss in the vibecession and a handful of viral fatal accidents involving non-domiciled CDL holders and you suddenly have enough people aware of the issue and angry about it to lobby for a crackdown.

I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."

Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.

The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people.

I have been wondering: for all the drama going on with frontier AI models in the world of digital security, I have to think there are some interesting red-team/blue-team ways to apply those to laws and regulations. Some of the big lawfare shifts we've seen in the last decade or so ("did you know we could just have all the border crossers say the shibboleth asylum and we have to let them in indefinitely until we can give them a hearing?") seem to have come from novel readings or applications of existing rules. It'd be at least interesting (and I haven't tried) to prompt those same models for what corners of the tax code could be abused --- or in reverse, to provide feedback to Congress and regulatory rulemakers --- to promote less-direct outcomes. It's not hard to imagine "hey Claude, let's figure out the most pathological case to bring to trial to make SCOTUS rule my desired direction" actually working.

The problem is less figuring out the ideas to sue over and more building out the necessary infrastructure and legal precedent to get those ideas before the Court. Believe me, there are many, many lawyers already working around the clock to bring these issues before a historically receptive SCOTUS. The thing is, unless you're a state suing another state, you can't just take your case to SCOTUS. It's a multi-year slog of trials and appeals that you have to successfully complete at least 2-3 times (SCOTUS won't hear a case if there isn't a disagreement between at least two circuit courts of appeal) before you even have a shot of getting on their docket. And even then it's a moonshot, with only a tiny percentage of petitions making it to briefing and argument.

The legal activists have good ideas coming out of their ears, but bringing an issue from Zero to SCOTUS, even with the best lawyers in the world working on it, is a ten-year process involving millions of dollars and dozens of skilled professionals working in perfect sync. And those skilled professionals are already making use of AI at least as aggressively as anyone else in the legal field. Maybe there's still some low-hanging fruit that AI can help them more effectively target, some subtle new way of speaking directly to the concerns of five different justices at the same time, but for the most part the bottlenecks are funding and court capacity, not lack of clever strategems.

I think you're right that legal activists aren't really limited by ideas today. But as an example, how will the APA notice and comment regime survive AI-generated slop comments? My understanding is that a lot of it today ends up as boilerplate copy-and-paste letter campaigns: if every commenter writes a unique letter, review will presumably be more involved. Or actively using AI to generate as many novel arguments for/against a proposed rule as possible to exhaust the review process. I'm sure the government side will start using AI to review comments, but I wouldn't expect them to be ahead of the public on their processes.

Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.

There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).

tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people

Interesting to think about.

In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.

But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.

The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.

(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)

The way I characterize it is that the "madhouse of maniacs" on right all agree that the left is trying to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs and must be stopped. Sometimes they think the left is trying to do this out of malice, but mostly they think it's just sheer foolishness.

Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.

This is kind of what I was getting at with "the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but doing it now is still something worthy of praise" and I'm suddenly wondering if you and I might not be in some of the same group chats.

I wonder how many Mottizens secretly know each other in real life but will never make the connection because none of us are stupid enough to tell our coworkers about the Motte. I'm growing increasingly convinced that I've shared office space or attended happy hours with at least a couple of you.

Wearing a t-shirt that reads “it’s okay to be white,” “Islam is right about women,” or “despite being 13% of the population…” to my next company happy hour to see if any Mottizens approach me. What could go wrong?

No, wear a t-shirt saying 'there is a leviathan shaped hole in the hock'.

If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.

The Pug and Trusty's are more my scene, or at least were when I was spending more time in DC. ;-)

I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?

News bandwidth. If Trump did all of these things on day one there's only a limited amount of excitement/liberal tears that it could be milked for. Then you'd spend 3.9 years wondering what those lazy oafs are doing or think the threat is gone and you go longer need radical response.

Dripping it out over four years shows that the enemy is active and that they are fighting the fight.

Don’t underestimate the power of institutional inertia. People get upset when the President can’t do things because he isn’t acting like a monarch, but will quickly decry him as a fascist with kingly aspirations whenever policy diverges from voter preference.

Trump could have pardoned everyone in J6 on his way out of office, and not done it after banking on winning 2024 (of which there was no guarantee) and doing it after taking office again, after those defendants suffered much monetary and jail time punishments. There are so many things Trump could be doing to fulfill his promise of financial access (under the misnomer of fighting against "debanking"). Etc. I agree with the other commenter when I say it's just incompetence.

It genuinely feels like incompetence. Not just on behalf of the administration but the entire right wing.

The conception on the right has been that the government does stuff that's bad, the private sector does stuff that's good, and the civilians are just honest spectators whose souls move at the mercy of the government and the whims of the free market, preferably also under the guidance of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

The left wing, to use these general terms, has in the meantime tried to integrate all of these things in a single ideological package. The markets, the government, the public perception of reality. It's all constantly being synchronized. You get a single ideological block with its own moral narratives, ingroup/outgroup distinctions and everything else. Which turns into a complete worldview. Call it 'Cultural Marxism', call it 'woke', call it 'the post war consensus' or the liberal moral order. Whatever it is, whatever permutation you come across, it's unapologetic, ruthless and consistently self serving. It knows exactly who is friend and who is enemy. What is right, what is wrong.

There is no such force on the right. The closest we've gotten to synchronization is Musk buying twitter, and Musk and Trump being friends. But that alliance was fragile at best since there is no shared worldview between them. 'Free market good' isn't a worldview. 'Government spending bad' isn't one either. In fact it's at best quaint and at worst stupid when your actual ideological enemies are using the 'free market' to push their worldview. Or using the government to fund and protect their foot soldiers.

The right doesn't know friend from foe. It doesn't know what's right and wrong, good or bad. Right wing media figures sometimes brag that the only active and engaging political and philosophical discourse happening in modernity happens on the right. Claiming that the left has become too insular and self absorbed to afford meaningful discourse. And that might be true, but that's also why the left can win and the right seemingly only lose. And no, calling your activist groups 'feds' isn't a worldview either.

There's no racist dragnet trying to identity non-white scammers, because over half the right thinks racism is evil. So instead of getting a clear and concise picture on the ground from coherent right wing activists or media about all the ways the world is wrong according to a dogmatic right wing worldview, we have to rely on the perfect storm of aspergers and autism to incidentally uncover the racist reality of the Somalian scam economy. Meanwhile, the entire left mobilizes without effort to proclaim that incidental racism is racism nonetheless. And that everyone involved is an evil racist. Except the scammers, of course. Peace be upon them.

The right has no ethos. And despite the smugness from the right, it's a land of those the left kicked out.

Yeah this is why the right can only, cut taxes for the rich, or bomb the middle east. That's literally all they ever do. They are absolutely horrible at using state power and usually deeply unserious or unsystematic.

Let’s be frank, both sides these days only play around the edges. How many people out there can you think of that are there at the fore, trying to come with whole new systems of thought and reimagining the entire political landscape for the 21st century?

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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