ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
8hr ago
From the perspective of whatever the hell the Trump administration is trying to do
I think the most charitable interpretation of the current incomprehensibility of "a thing" that the Trump administration is trying to do... is that there are different factions within the administration, each of which has its own perspective on what they're trying to do, and that those perspectives are not, indeed, coherent with one another. For example, if you're someone in the administration who thinks that tariffs can be used as a tool to help secure supply chains for critical defense/etc. products, you probably don't care one whit whether there is a tariff on cheap slop rubber ducks bought on Amazon from Asian sweatshops.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
how many steps of the process of car manufacturing can you, hypothetical power of a country, get within your borders
As many as you want? Forget tariffs; you can just ban stuff from foreign. The biggest constraint would be if you're not a large enough country to be able to develop all of the specialization required (while also accomplishing all the other things a country needs to accomplish).
how should you go about it
One needs a metric for "should". Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.
I kind of joke, but only kind of. Market size is a significant factor in the diversity of goods that are going to be available and how 'advanced' they can be, because diversity and 'advancedness' requires significant specialization. Thus, if we're shutting off large chunks of the market because we don't trust them, we're necessarily going to take hits elsewhere. Where you "should" be on this tradeoff curve is extremely dependent on how you've defined "should" in the first place.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.
Precisely. They engaged in standard statutory interpretation of the INA. If the INA had said something different, for example, (or the Trump I administration was trying to do something different,) then perhaps that statutory interpretation could have come out the other way. Their opinion was in no way, "Eh, this is remotely related to 'a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy', so we just can't say anything at all." Instead, they had a statute that delegated certain powers under certain conditions, and they did standard statutory interpretation to decide that the executive branch was, indeed, correct in interpreting it in a way that allowed them to do the things they were doing in the situation which they were doing it.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
I think courts are authorized to, at the very least, assume that the assertions of the executive branch are correct as to what is being alleged (which they may or may not need to do; this part gets complicated), then decide whether or not those assertions, as stated, constitute "an invasion or predatory incursion [that] is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government" as a matter of statutory interpretation.
Possible hypo land. Suppose the literal Venezuelan government sent precisely one spy to the US. This spy does some stuff. Maybe standard espionage stuff. Maybe a targeted assassination or something. The executive branch asserts this and decides to throw all the rest of the Venezuelan nationals out of the country. Is that enough to trigger the statute? I think courts might want to say "no", even if the executive branch wants to say "yes". But I don't know! They might say yes! I could even imagine reasons for them to say yes! But I do, indeed, think that they have some room to do statutory interpretation. ...then, we proceed down a chain of increasing hypos until we start to get a sense for how to interpret the statute.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
Most of this is "refined discussion", which I am generally not opposed to.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
The answer is... sure.
But this is really where we are. And I think we can mostly jump to:
So when you say things like-
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
My instinctive response is to find this a claim needing justification I doubt you'd be able to provide. Not because you wouldn't have arguments, but because I doubt you'd recognize or acknowledge as worthy of respect paradigms where spending at Walmert could be concluded as 'lost.'
I would simply request a description of a single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost". A single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount of wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost". I don't know whether I would recognize or acknowledge it as worthy of respect until I hear at least one. I don't think you've presented one. I think you're in the land of refined discussions of details and percentages and such, where things can be shaded slightly through some other valuations and other external reasoning. Nothing close to, "Yeah, that entire amount is just lost."
(Just so you don't have to guess, I am sympathetic to external reasoning about supply chains for defense/pandemics/etc. That is a far cry from simply saying that just the bulk dollar figure is "lost".)
ControlsFreak
4d ago
Thanks! I know I'd heard this correction before, SMH...
I think it's still perfectly fine. Absent some significant external reasoning, the continued existence of trade is at least a prima facie reason to think that there is probably value there. For precisely one of the reasons you give; if businesses keep paying lots of people who aren't providing them value, they go out of business.1 As such, they're probably going to try to fire you if you're consistently negative value. As you say, it is obviously not proof that 100% of all employment relationships are positive sum, but if the vast majority of them aren't, then almost everything is thrown out the window (...all of the businesses go bankrupt, etc.). One can acknowledge that some percentage probably aren't perfect, but then we have to get into details of whether/how we can identify them from the outside, whether/how we have any tools to change that, or if it's best to just acknowledge that the employers are in a better position to judge the value of their employment relations. They have the best incentive to make sure that the lion's share of their employment decisions are positive value, and we should observe that they are, indeed, positive value. Normal curves are normal, but the mean is positive, and probably significantly so.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
make people spend more than they 'rationally' should
Again, one must impose some sort of external reasoning to overcome the prima facie case. You point out one of the very very few examples where this external reasoning is the strongest - gambling - for we can simply compute the mathematics and have almost no need to get into the much thornier problems that such external reasoning normally requires.
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
Not all trades are good, any more than all investments are good. There are plenty of bad, corrupt, wasteful, and outright harmful investments. It is not hard to find histories of similar trade dynamics fully open to critiques of being driven by bad decisions and bad value judgements.
Fully granted. Now, overcome the prima facie case that most are good (especially given some conditions on freeness and such) by calling upon some sort of specific external reasoning for the instant case. Not just that there is some tail on the normal distribution, where someone bought some useless gadget from Temu or whatever. Justify that the entire trade (in goods) deficit is "lost".
1 - Note that the fact that businesses go out of business is "probably not the example you want to use for that argument". The vast majority of the time, businesses go out of business for a whole host of other reasons that are significantly more poignant than just making some bad deal with some employee(s).
In comparison, for those who haven't looked at the text of the still-existing law, the important part that is about to be argued in all the courts says:
any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government
Having not looked at any briefs yet, just the face of the text, I think it's going to be a bit of a tough road to hoe to argue that the nation or government of Venezuela is perpetrating, attempting, or threatening an invasion or predatory incursion. They would indeed be on far stronger grounds if the Alien Friends Act were still in effect.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade
"lost". It honestly is just so extremely stupid. As if it were that we had something of value that was just lit on fire. Or was simply stolen from us without providing anything in return. As if I should say that I "lost" however much money to Walmart last year. Or that my employer "lost" money in employing me. The entire point of those trades is that each and every party to them gained more value than they "lost"; otherwise, they wouldn't have made the trade!
ControlsFreak
4d ago
"Manufacturing of physical goods" or "manufacturing jobs"? Counted how? If you believe the Real Value Added folks, the former hasn't left, and the latter is a significantly different type of problem that tariffs may just be orthogonal to.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
Eh, from today's Short Circuit:
Allegation: Colorado middle-school teacher invites student—who has never questioned her own gender identity—to an after-school art club. Student is surprised to arrive at what is actually a Gender and Sexualities Alliance meeting, where she is told that students who are uncomfortable with their bodies are more likely to be trans and is encouraged to come out as trans, which she does. Although the guest speaker warned students that it might not be safe to tell their parents about the meeting, she does. The parents sue the school district and its board of education, alleging violations of their parental substantive-due-process rights. Tenth Circuit: We're not sure what the scope of parental SDP rights are, but it doesn't matter because this wasn't official district policy.
Reading through the factual background in the opinion, I could see this stuff being a pet project of a teacher (and apparently a substitute teacher), just with the district administration providing cover for them. My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Meade's paper seems reasonable, in terms of an academic squabble. What I struggle more with is turning it into a coherent critique at the current moment, especially trying to reconcile it with your other statements and your other link. For example, you focused on quality adjustments, which as I mentioned, I understand there are some difficulties there... but Meade basically didn't talk about those at all. American Compass seemed to embrace something like real value added with their first two "grounding factors", while their third seems to me to be irrelevant. It also sort of randomly shifted to focusing solely on output, but included some bollocks claims like, "...BEA significantly overstates the growth of the computer sector (NIACS 334) because it assumes that when a computer doubles in speed due to Moore’s law that actual production doubled..." when their citations for this claim do absolutely no such thing. I'm just really struggling to scrap together a specific, coherent complaint that I can just go look at and see, "Yes, right here is where the actually-claimed numbers actually go bollocks, and now I can see that I should be interpreting this entirely differently."
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Ah, Kenji's still got your back. I imagine you could make some adjustments to make it a bit easier or to vary the flavor profile.
FWIW, I'm not super convinced that there are all that many health risks of eating meat, and it wasn't part of the initial assignment. I'd still suggest giving something like this a shot to at least get a sense for the range of flavors that are possible. I also get the sense that choices on sodium are a bit orthogonal here, too. One can choose low/high sodium versions of both meat and tofu.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Yeah, funniest case scenario, I'm sure each of those three hypothetical characters could successfully be told how to hit the Cat III autoland button.
The term "supply chain attack" has been applied to the world of software (not just pagers in Lebanon) to describe a modern phenomenon that arises because of the way modern software development works. Very little code today is written by an individual (or small group of individuals who are all working for the same company or whatever) in a way that relies only on their efforts to run it all the way down to the bare metal. Dependencies are essentially omnipresent. That is, someone else, somewhere, wrote some other code that the main characters in our story think could be helpful for making their own code work, so they just import it and use it. They often have to trust that it just does what it says it does on the tin. They may have to hope that if something goes wrong with it, that someone else (or their successors) will update it and keep it running correctly. This phenomenon is probably most famously summed up in this XKCD.
As such, it is sometimes possible for someone to get into one of these dependencies, find or insert a flaw, and then exploit it in order to get at some higher-level software package. There have been tons of examples, some very high profile, of this happening. The funniest version that I had heard of to date was "typosquatting". The idea is that, sometimes, just by random chance, some programmer somewhere will misspell a package that they want to import. Typosquatting is used for websites, too, where there is just some chance that some number of people will misspell a website and happen to go to a site controlled by a bad guy (famous example was goggle(dot)com). The idea for package dependencies is the same; some percentage of the time, some programmer may just accidentally type "hugingface" instead of "huggingface"; if the bad guys published a malicious version by that typo-d name and the programmer in question somehow doesn't catch it, big oof.
There is now a funnier version. Of course it would be LLMs that give us a funnier version. "Slopsquatting", they call it. They even created a wikipedia article already for the paper. The idea is that so many coders (and "vibe coders") are now using LLMs to create mountains of new code, some who barely understand what's going on in their newly-created code. The LLM just creates it, and it works! It's magic! Of course, anyone who has spent much time with LLMs know that they do occasionally hallucinate. And, well, hallucinating is close enough to typo-ing that it'll get the job done.
It turns out that LLMs will, some percentage of the time, just randomly hallucinate a package that doesn't exist (or at least, doesn't exist yet). They'll "imagine" that maybe such a package, if it existed, might be helpful to the task they were given to accomplish. And they'll just write code as if it existed and did the thing that they'd kinda like it to do. Of course, just like with typosquatting, if you have an attentive and knowledgeable human watching closely, there's no reason why they couldn't catch it. But again, we're entering the world of "vibe coders"; at least some percentage of them are simply not going to have a clue. "The magic inscrutable matrices gave me this code. I'll try to run it."
So now, what if the bad guys have already figured this out? The bad guys create a package that they think is likely to be hallucinated, and they turn it into a very bad package, indeed. To the "vibe coder", it might even look like it's running correctly! The magic inscrutable matrices came through again; let's ship some product! Utterly brilliant... and utterly devilish.
At least this one is funny.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
Whether or not that is the case, it doesn't seem to be remotely relevant to this study or what it did/did not do. Just try to explain it. Put it into words. Actually connect the two thoughts.
A car mechanic that started lecturing me about physics and the need for fuel would be an asshole and I'd never go to him again.
Consider two possible situations. In Situation A, a customer just had their brand new car towed to the shop, because it stopped working. The mechanic investigates and discovers that it's out of fuel. "Good news!" he thinks. Perhaps the customer just had some minor issue with a new car, not quite seeing how it displays the fuel situation, and there's no need for any expensive repair, just some fuel. But when they tell this to the customer, the customer gets angry. "That's bullshit!" the customer says. Fuel has nothing to do with it. After all, look at the statistics! Cars almost never stop working in the real world because they run out of fuel! Hundreds of millions of hours of operations, and it almost never comes up! There must be something else going on, they swear. Maybe they need a vortex generator or something. That seems more likely to them to help get them going again.
In Situation B, the car shows up, and the mechanic determines that the alternator has gone bad. Nevertheless, they lecture the customer on the need to put fuel in the car.
Yes, in Situation B, the mechanic would be a bloody stupid asshole. But in Situation A, the customer has displayed that they are fundamentally ignorant of scientific reality. You would be shocked as to how many people are legitimately fundamentally ignorant of the scientific reality of body weight dynamics. There is no point in moving to some more refined conversation of different octane levels, different additive packages, fuel filter replacement timelines, etc., or even just a conversation of how they might want to approach planning for when to refuel to accomplish whatever goal they have (saving money, reducing transactions, whatever) until the absolutely extreme lack of basic understanding has been remedied. Your choices are to try to get the customer to understand the basic scientific reality... or just slap some fuel in their tank, charge them some money, let them continue being fundamentally ignorant of the world, send them on their way, and maybe hope they don't come back to your shop. You simply have zero chance of providing them with any sort of good advice that can reliably lead them to achieve desirable outcomes if they have so utterly rejected the fundamental reality of the world.
I read this comment as confirming that you don't actually personally know anyone who has done it. I'm not surprised, because frankly, your previously-stated "expectation" is wildly miscalibrated. Shockingly so for a rationalist-adjacent forum. So incredibly miscalibrated that it's actually more extreme than the first-hand accounts I've heard from literal competitive pro bodybuilders, who are trying to get their body fat percentage deep into the single digits, to a place where it is literally, physically unsustainable over time. People who dedicated years of their life to an extreme competitive pursuit... and your expectation is that just a normal person achieving a normal weight necessitates even more extreme measures?! Rarely in the history of these forums have I ever seen particular views that are this far out from reality.
But again, I'm sort of not surprised. I haven't been banging the drum too loudly, but I've been banging it a little; this is basically the most plausible explanation for why people observe that "diet and exercise doesn't work" - because most people are frankly ignorant of the reality of the world. Worse, they're probably being actively deceived. There's bullshit on TV like The Biggest Loser. There is no show called The Normal Loser. TV is endlessly obsessed by the "extreme". You don't see just a normal person learning how the world works, learning how to take agency over their consumption, taking data and observing over time that, yes, indeed, 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk, and if you remain relatively consistent over long periods of time, you will lose weight. You don't see that it's noisy, that it fluctuates, that people aren't hyper-precise and sometimes have special occasions or whatever... but that in the end, if you just keep doing the damn thing, it works. You don't see that you can eat a normal amount of normal food, living a normal life, and have it just work. And so people try stupid (or obviously unsustainable) stuff instead, it doesn't work (because it was stupid or obviously unsustainable), that gets chalked up in the "statistics", and it reinforces the idea that nothing works.
The problem is a combination of it being hard to market "generics" and woke takeover of government public health and messaging. First, I joke about "generics" in terms of drugs, but yeah, it's bloody hard to monetize the bog standard advice that is scientific reality. People see the signs at the gym they drive by that promise "Lose 20lbs in 30 days!" or whatever. They're inundated by huge promises, and those folks need to either bait-and-switch you... or have you do something that is obviously unsustainable. Both cases are likely to contribute to the statistics and beliefs that science-based diet and exercise "don't work". A while ago, I covered here what I viewed as an arbitrage attempt, trying to package the basic scientifically-proven advice into a package that might attract customers in a market flooded by deception and which had a funny scheme to accomplish monetization. (Of course, it involved straightforwardly lying and deceiving their potential customers.) It's just bloody hard to make money telling people that, yes, we know how science works, that no, you're not magic or special, that yes, you can do this if you know what you're getting into and do it over a long time, that no, you don't have to go to extremes like a bodybuilder or like move to Alaska or anything, etc. Probably the only people who can monetize this are a small number of honest personal trainers, who can have a no shit, come to Jesus personal conversation with their client, assess their willingness to believe and/or the degree to which they have been deceived, etc. That doesn't currently scale in a world full of lying liars.
Second, the woke takeover of government public health and messaging. It probably would take a gov't funded, like documentary series or something. There's an obvious profit-related reason why you see shit like The Biggest Loser and not The Normal Loser. How many years would you have to dedicate to filming that? How would you possibly fund it? If you want to retain credibility, only provide scientifically-validated information, and not have to take a bunch of money from this commercial weight-loss program or that commercial weight-loss program or this app or that app or whatever, where would you get the money for such a significant endeavor? I guess maybe some other nonprofit, but those have been taken over by the lefties, too. There's just no appetite with them to show normal people, living normal lives, taking agency and controlling their weight in accordance with scientific reality. In a former time, with old governments, who didn't reject scientific reality of something as simple as biology in favor of wokeness, and which acknowledged that this is a significant matter of importance on which public education is seriously needed and seriously lacking, perhaps you might have gotten such a thing.
Frankly, without something like that to point you to, it's going to be hard for you to realize just how insanely miscalibrated you are. You're probably not going to, like, go randomly meet some people in real life who know the scientific reality, have personally used it, continue to live normal lives using it, and are willing to talk to you about it. To be honest, we are often pretty careful in real life to not be too blunt about our knowledge of the scientific reality. We sometimes nibble around the edges with folks in conversation, but most people don't want to hear it in full. It's weird. We worry that they will think that we're judging them if we even talk about our knowledge of how reality works. So, we kinda don't talk about it much. So people don't have exposure to know that you can live a normal life, doing normal things, and be perfectly fine.
They just don't know. You just don't know. You're extremely miscalibrated. None of this is surprising, because very few people have an incentive to tell you the truth and many many people have an incentive to lie to you and intentionally cause you to be wildly miscalibrated.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
The evidence is in our obesity rate and the studies showing that dieting usually fails longterm.
That is not evidence of the thing you claimed.
You have to read more carefully: “direct precious mental energy to real solutions.”
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years.
Awesome. So, we're not dealing with, like, a biological inability or anything. Not in the same class as we might be dealing with if there was just, like, a clear IQ cutoff, such that a big percentage of people were literally just cognitively incapable of learning calculus or something.
Instead, we're in the fuzzy land of what incentives "should be" enough or how much "effort" people might have to put in. It's fuzzy, yes, but we're far from the land of, "People can't do this." We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"
But I expect the required measures to be extreme...
Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation? Yes, as your cut gets deeper, you feel physical and mental effects. I've felt them. Intelligent strategies allow for a period of maintenance (a "diet break") to help alleviate these symptoms before continuing. They're annoying, but not that bad. When you return to maintenance, it's not all that bad in the long term.
Right now, we go the gym probably 3-4 days a week. Work has been weird for us lately, so not as often as we like, and not as much time as we'd like. Often just main lifts; basically no cardio. Almost negligible caloric impact, TBH. We eat good, tasty food. Literally just had Sichuan for dinner. We know about how many calories are in the recipe, and we portion it out accordingly in a way that we know approximately fits our maintenance calorie needs. Not a drop of Soylent or a crumb of a MealSquare in sight. Special occasions are nothing. Literally just had two of those this week. That is an outlier. But yeah, even if I blow my maintenance by 500cal on a special occasion, it's pretty trivial to make up for it long-term. We live in a city, four minutes away from multiple grocery stores (including a wonderful Asian market with excellently flavorful foods).
We live a normal life. This is normal life. We just know how many calories we need, because we tracked it for a while. We know about how many calories are in most of our foods, and we don't even track it anymore. Our portions aren't super exactly precise; they're in the right ballpark. It's normal life, and it's been about five years now since my wife got in on it, too. I honestly think you just don't know anyone who lives a normal life, but has the knowledge and experience.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
it’s not practical in a population-level discussion
Facts not in evidence.
There’s a lot that should be studied.
Look, I have no concerns with studying any of those things. You promised me "real solutions". That means that you should be able to demonstrate, with evidence, that some set of your "real solutions" meet the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
According to Merriam-Webster, it would be control, ownership, possession, gain, accumulation, and acquiring.
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