MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
27m ago
Trump managed to lose Canadians who would naturally be MCGA Conservatives by shitposting about invading. That is why Carney beat Poilievre.
While binge-watching Canadian anti-Trump Youtube videos one dull evening, I was surprised that most of them were on channels that had previously been posting right-coded patriotic content up to and including British Empire nostalgia.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
32m ago
It is amazing how many literary novels include literature professors having sex with hot coeds.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
33m ago
Yes - there is unmet demand for non-shit urban living in the US, which is why the places with less-shit urban living (like Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, the bits of SF with no shit) command such a large price premium relative to upper-middle-class suburbs. Some of the families living in McMansions in the Woodlands would choose to live in 1300 sq ft 3-bed apartments in a neighborhood like Neuilly or Holland Park if the option existed.
In contrast, the UK has unmet demand for American-style areas where even the urban core is auto-orientated and you never need to get out of your car except to walk across a parking lot, so Milton Keynes commands a significant price premium even though it is a miserable soulless commuter town. If someone built Indianapolis in a green field in the English Midlands, it would fill up quickly.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
While I am 80% with BurdensomeCount on this point, the cultural sensitivity is a furphy. The Americans don't do cultural sensitivity, they have been powerful enough not to need to since the 1920's, and the rest of the pro-American world is used to dealing with that.
The point is that the American-led system used to be (by design) win-win for the countries participating in it - very much including the US. The EU and first-world Asia don't pay directly for US military protection, but the willingness to trade goods and services for portraits of Benjamin Franklin is part of the package deal. This would all be clearer if the BEP put Nuclear Gandhi* on the forthcoming $200 bill instead of Donald Trump.
Trump doesn't like win-win arrangements (and nor do his dumber supporters in the country), and wants to replace the status quo with a setup where the US wins and the EU and first-world Asia lose. The danger is that he blows up a system which (and I am pulling numbers out of my ass here) generates 6% of GDP in net benefits in order to extract 1.5% of GDP in tribute.
There is a separate issue that including Red China in the system has turned out to probably be a mistake, because the CCP was talking about win-win outcomes while seeking win-lose ones quietly. But Trump isn't trying to kick the Chinese out - China gets a better deal than traditional US allies do.
Looking at dysfunction in domestic politics, America is less governable than any other large democracy except France - even with a trifecta, neither party can pass a deficit-reducing budget. The cost is eaten by UST holders accepting a lousy return. You could try to replace that with actual extractive imperialism, but @BurdensomeCount and I come from a culture that had some idea how to do that right (and how and why it ceased to be profitable in the first half of the twentieth century), and you don't. The skill level issues America experiences when it tries to do imperialism are well-known.
* The adoptive child of Sid Meier, born at Microprose HQ, and therefore American under the 14th amendment. Dead in later versions of Civ, and therefore eligible to be on a banknote.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2hr ago
There are a number of options here, assuming that government schools exist. ("Every school a charter school" type approaches are clearly possible, but they don't have a particularly good record in practice) In order of desirability I would put them as:
- Elected politicians of the normal level of competence for national politics (or state politics in well-run US state) supervise teachers
- Headteachers/school principals supervise teachers and nobody supervises them
- The sort of person who becomes a manager in a large school district supervises teachers
- The sort of crazy retiree who ends up holding unpaid local elected office in a small town supervises teachers. PTA mums supervising teachers is a minor variant of this, which is why British schools ended up sidelining elected parent-governors.
In the UK, (1) got us acceptable outcomes under Blair's rotation of education secretaries, and very good outcomes under Gove, (2) got us okay outcomes for most kids but some schools decided not to teach the kids to read, (3) got us "The perfect Ofsted lesson - how to impress school inspectors by never, ever teaching the kids anything" and (4) is outside the Overton window.
I suspect most Motteposters would disagree with me and rate (4) above (3). They may be right in a US context.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2hr ago
I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build.
There are three issues here - a skill level issue where the hard costs of a big project are a lot higher than they would be in a country that didn't suck, a political culture issue where either NIMBYs kill the project or soft costs explode fighting them off, and a bloat issue where projects get overspecified because it isn't anyone's job to control costs.
As regards large-scale civil engineering, the US has all three problems, such that the overall cost of new roads is 3-5x the cheapest European countries * and the cost of new rail infrastructure is 5-10x (10-20x in NYC).
With data centres, I suspect the skill level issue is mitigated because Google and suchlike can hire first-rate people to do unglamorous work in a way neither the government nor the big construction contractors can. The NIMBY issue can be managed by building in red states, or by Big Tech buying the Government of California en bloc. I suspect Google eats the bloat, and Elon personally trims bloated projects at 3am with his hands while shitposting with his feet, or some other similar feat of workaholism.
* Per Alon Levy, these are Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the less corrupt parts of Italy. France is slightly better than average, Germany slightly worse, and the UK shockingly bad when compared to anywhere except North America.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3hr ago
The Amish are commensals living on the fringe of a technological society. If the whole world regressed to late medieval technology, we would get late medieval outcomes.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3hr ago
In a community without widespread knowledge of genetics, or one like ours where most people learn genetics in school but compartmentalise it as dangerous knowledge only be used on biology exams, "family" or "blood" or "lineage" or equivalent is the emic unit and genes are an etic unit. To be emic, it has to be something that the community under discussion bellyfeels.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4hr ago
I don't think there is any disagreement here. In Texas you have Texas Democrats who want to build up in their cities (and Texas Republicans don't try to stop them) and Texas Republicans who want to build out in their cities (and Texas Democrats don't try to stop them). But in the deep blue states (definitely including CA, OR and NY - I am not an expert on the US-wide situation) - and the rest of the Anglosphere with the appropriate recolouration - you have blue state Democrats who mostly don't want to build up in their cities (and blue state Republicans try to stop them when they do, and sometimes succeed) and blue state Republicans who are kind of meh about building out in their cities (and blue state Democrats try to stop them when they do, and often succeed).
This is unusual because it is a difference between blue state and red state political culture, not a difference between blue tribe and red tribe beliefs.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
19hr ago
so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol
This is the New Urbanist view - that you can absolutely build destination neighborhoods where everyone arrives by car, parks, and then walks within the neighborhood, but Americans fail to do so by default. Apart from indoor malls and planned New Urbanist communities, Toronto is the place I would most expect to pull it off.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
20hr ago
14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult
This process is broken (particularly for boys) across the West regardless of urban form, although I agree car-dependent suburbia doesn't help. [Things would be different if a teen could run a beater car with the income from a Saturday job and some DIY shop time on Sunday afternoon - I don't know how realistic that ever was in the US, but given the cost of insurance for teen drivers it probably never should have been.]
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
Do you have a link to polling showing that Americans generally dislike Indians? I know Indian immigrants in the UK (who are highly selected and are the highest-earning, best-educated ethnic group as a result) poll net-positive but when I try to find US polls Google keeps sending me polls of Indian-Americans rather than polls about them.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
Looking round Israeli settlements on Google Street View shows a lot more multifamily buildings than would be allowed in US suburbia. Israel proper has a housing crisis due to rapid population growth and entrenched NIMBYs in the Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem suburbs, so the settler demand is for any family-sized housing (including multi-bedroom flats), not for American-style suburbia.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver
And this is the whole point. Privately-owned cars just work better than any kind of scheduled or on-demand transit at low enough population densities, or at off-peak times (noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak). But something like London's Victoria Line or Paris's Metro 1 have enough demand to justify a train and professional driver every two minutes and then some, from 6am to after midnight. Roads for private cars don't scale to that level of demand. Autonomous cars help a little bit (because of faster reaction times) but not enough to turn London, Paris or Manhattan into DFW or Atlanta. Centrally co-ordinated autonomous cars can do a lot better, but the kind of person who really wants to live a car-based lifestyle is exactly the kind of person who doesn't want their car controlled by someone else's computer.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21hr ago
· Edited 21hr ago
additional few minutes for the trains that stop there
That's a very large cost for a successful HSR route. You are potentially delaying 1000 people by 4 minutes (for a Shinkansen) or 6-8 minutes (for a TGV, which has worse acceleration) to allow a single digit number of people to get on or off.
To get full benefit, you also have to route the high-speed line through the intermediate city you want to stop at, which adds a lot of construction cost and NIMBY-aggravation. There is a reason why the TGV tends to make intermediate stops at out-of-town park-and-ride stations.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
22hr ago
Germany has a firewall. France has a firewall too
It's called "two thirds of the voters voting against right-populists". If that changes, the incentives on politicians change. As long as two thirds of the voters oppose right-populism, centrist and centre-right parties who break the firewall will be punished at the ballot box, as we just saw in the Netherlands.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
23hr ago
And single-family homes on small lots.
The metro areas with urban growth boundaries are the same ones that resist densification downtown because that is what blue state voters (especially blue state Republicans) vote for. Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.
This effect is less obvious in the UK because everywhere has local politics dominated by Boomer NIMBYs and the only solution appears to be for the working-age population to wait it out six-to-a-bedroom in our overpriced hovels chanting "They can't live forever".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Sex slaves for blind people?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Other public transit pros:
Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim
If everyone else drives to a destination neighbourhood, then once you get there the place is necessarily dominated by parking so you can't walk from the theatre to the restaurant to the bar. There are ways of fixing this problem - New Urbanists talk about "park once" districts and point out that the proof-of-concept is the mall, which forces people to get out of their cars and walk from shop to shop by putting the "street" the shops are on indoors. But it means giving up the ability to park right outside the building you are going to.
Self driving cars make this a lot easier because (even if they are privately owned, rather than robotaxis which don't park up at all) parking in a lot outside the destination neighbourhood becomes zero cost. On the other hand, they will add a whole different set of moving congestion problems that we haven't really thought about yet.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Is there an allegation that
- The law was broken?
- The votes were not counted correctly?
Given the known context, it reads like a claim that "history will discover" that Trump was a Russian-backed Manchurian candidate.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
People (including Elon Musk, who can't be prosecuted, and Lucy Connolly, who quite properly was) called for arson, directed against actual, identifiable human beings who were Muslim asylum-seekers based on a crime committed by someone who was neither an asylum-seeker nor a Muslim.
Some of us think that, morally, facts matter when burning people out of their homes.
Legally, actual incitement has always been a free speech corner case, going back to John Stuart Mill's writing about when it is legitimate to say that corn-dealers are responsible for starvation. (He thinks this is fine under normal circumstances, but not if said directly to a riotous mob outside the home of an identifiable corn-dealer). The US tradition is deliberately overprotective of free speech in the corner cases to avoid chilling effects. "Grass is magenta, therefore you should burn down a hotel with people in it" is exactly the kind of speech you would prefer not to protect, but need to if you want as strong a free speech culture as the US is trying to produce.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
There is an important practical difference between "My opponent won using dirty tricks" and "My opponent won by breaking the law and/or tampering with ballots" which is that, given the laws and traditions of western democracy, one is a sore loser whining and the other is an implicit call to overturn the result. And frequently an explicit one - see 2000 in Florida (everyone), 2004 in Ohio (left-wing Democrats), 2016 (Jill Stein and a few fringe left-wing Democrats), or 2020 (Trump).
Hilary's explicit claim is "Russia hacked and wikileaked the Podesta e-mails with the intention of helping Trump beat me" (almost certainly true) and that this meaningfully affected the results (almost certainly false). It is the same type of claim as "Twitter and the Deep State tried to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and this meaningfully affected the result in 2020" (false, because the suppression did not succeed, but this was not for want of trying), not "Dominion, Smartmatic and GOPe election officials conspired to report results that didn't match the votes cast"
Being a modestly talented politician, Hilary is able to make the less explosive claim while darkly hinting to her crazier supporters that she secretly believes the more explosive one (that Russia hacked voting machines or otherwise corrupted the tabulation of the election). But she carefully avoids making it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Nowhere in the article you link does Hilary claim either of the things I said she didn't claim. I agree she is throwing shade on the election in a way which is irresponsible, but she carefully doesn't say that the votes were tabulated incorrectly or that the law was violated.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Russiagate wasn't election denial - the leading Democrats and Deep Staters pushing it didn't deny that Trump in 2016 had won a plurality of the popular vote in states representing an majority of the Electoral College, or that Trump was the lawfully elected President. (There were some more fringy figures like Jill Stein who tried to overturn the 2016 election, which goes back to @quiet_NaN's point that "not spamming frivolous allegations of election fraud" is somewhere where the pro-establishment left is better than either the anti-establishment left or the right).
Teens did work more, and that was a good thing in terms of the transition to adulthood. I don't think they did the jobs that are now being done by illegal immigrants. Teens couldn't do seasonal agricultural work or heavy construction unless it was in their own family or a close friend's business. The classic teen jobs in the 1990s UK I grew up in were seasonal tourism-related work, waiting tables, and retail, which AFAIK are now more likely to be done by undergraduates. Some older teens did warehouse work or entry-level office admin, but that tended to be restricted to the summer between school and university.
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