MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10hr ago
That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.
Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
people's regard for the state of the law?
The state of the law varies by time and place. Crime in El Salvador shortly before Bukele was elected was an order of magnitude worse than it ever got in America. At some point (which the 2020s US has not reached, except in the deluded minds of a small number of San Francisco leftists) there are more people with a friend or relative unfairly imprisoned than there are crime victims. I think the US would hit that point if you locked up an additional 1% of the population Bukele-style - i.e. without explicitly targetting proven repeat offenders.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13hr ago
Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.
Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level. If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.
The US didn't scale back mass incarceration because of soft-on-crime Democrats, they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties. Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13hr ago
If you had real political parties rather than primaries then the parties would have an incentive to get the expertise they needed into the House by running the experts in safe districts.
If each subcommittee has 15 members (about the average for current House subcommittees) and each part-time Representative sits on two, then you could have about 1500 sub-committees - roughly one for each Senate-confirmed executive branch officer under the current system. So as long as the required expertise was there and there was a working system for getting less-controversial legislation that passed after a detailed markup in subcommittee through committee and to a quick yes/no vote of the whole House, you could indeed replace regulations with legislation.
I assume that members of the main committees would be full-time. I also suspect you would need some kind of Grand Committee of a few hundred senior full-time Representatives (probably the same ones that sit on the major committees) that could handle bills which are sufficiently important that you don't want to pass the text reported out of committee without further debate, in the same way that current legislatures allow for amendments to be proposed and voted on on the floor. I assume that Grand Committee members would get Washington offices and larger staffs, and that Grand Committee members plus a random selection of part-time Reps would get seats in the House Chamber for important ceremonial events.
In this model the work of a backbench part-time Representative has three components:
- Constituent service.
- Ensuring "their" Grand Committee member (what "their" means depends on how the Grand Committee is elected and how the party caucuses stitch up those elections) is aware of issues that particularly affect their district.
- Legislative work in sub-committee.
Sub-committee chairs also need to spend a lot of time managing their subcommittee's business through the parent major committee - they might need to be full-time as well to do that job.
Full-time Representatives would have similar jobs to what they do now, except that their "constituents" would be the backbench members of their own party, rather than voters.
It feels like an experiment worth trying.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14hr ago
Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.
This doesn't make sense - the whole point of sovereignty is to solve the problems that can't be solved by freely-formed associations (like . In practice those problems tend to exist in physical space, so practical sovereignty is territorial. A century of people who don't live together can't provide policing, defense, roads, environmental regulations etc. and a century that net contributors can leave at any time can't provide social insurance unless there is some kind of shared bond that means that the other 99 members won't just leave if one gets expensively sick.
A similar system that functioned purely for allocating voting power (so there is still a single sovereign, but it is controlled by a vote of the nine meta-meta-meta-century representatives) is part of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sort-of-utopia dath ilan, and the general approach (which is a good idea and should probably be tried) is called liquid democracy
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14hr ago
· Edited 14hr ago
I would like to second the linked post about political parties (as understood in the rest of the democratic world) being illegal in the United States. This is something where Americans don't realise how weird their political system is - in most of the world, parties make their own rules for how they select candidates.
One of my not-widely-held views is that Duverger's law is not the main explanation for the US two-party system - other FPTP countries have fewer serious parties than PR countries, but they don't normally have exactly two (Canada, the UK, and India all have systems with two dominant parties but the smaller parties consistently get seats in Parliament and aren't going anywhere).* The big difference between the US and other FPTP countries is that in the US the easiest way for an outsider to run for President is to capture one of the existing party lines with an outsider primary campaign, whereas in other FPTP countries the easiest way is to set up a new party. Ballot access laws in the US are a relatively small part of the difference - the main one is that the primary system makes it easier for an outsider to skinsuit an existing political party.
If the US had a Commonwealth-style political system, the Republican party would have kicked Trump out - in the same way Kinnock kicked Militant out of Labour in the 1980's or the Tories kicked out their remaining pro-EU MPs between 2016 and 2019. He would have had to do what Farage did, and set up his own populist political party.
FWIW, I think that political parties which can police their own political boundaries are a good thing and skinsuit candidates are a bad thing. The American system appears to produce worse candidates than allowing party organisations to select candidates, and there is an obvious reason for this - if you are a professional politician or a serious activist, you are a lot more motivated to take electability and competence into account when voting in an internal party election (being in power is a lot more fun than being in opposition) than you would be as an armchair supporter. American primaries are either successfully managed by party insiders so they don't actually function as open primaries (the The Party Decides thesis), elect the candidate with the most cash and/or name recognition, or elect an ideologically pure candidate who is going to turn off the median voter.
* Any discussion of two-party systems gets confused by the period c. 1945-1980 where almost every democracy including Germany (PR) and Australia (AV) had something close to a two-party system because of the dominance of class-based politics.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Normally, "sanctions" refers to laws a state makes which restrict its own citizens, residents, businesses etc. (including foreign-owned businesses operating on its territory) from doing business with the sanctioned country, and increasingly to laws which restrict its banks from financing (even indirectly) transactions to and from the sanctioned country. (And it is effectively impossible to transact in USD without a US bank being indirectly involved, which is why US sanctions even in the conventional sense have such a powerful extra-territorial effect). Enforcement of traditional sanctions, like enforcement of the vast majority of laws, is territorial. States enforce laws against activity taking place on their own territory - even if in this case the aim is to produce an extra-territorial effect. The US has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting US-based entities who trade with/finance sanctioned parties, and the EU has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting EU-based entities likewise.
The ship was sanctioned (for Iranian connections, not Venezuelan) and thus subject to seizure.
The passive voice is obfuscating what happened here. The US declared the ship "sanctioned" despite the ship being entirely outside its jurisdiction. (The claim that it was sanctioned for Iranian connections is a distraction - the ship was seized because it was trading with Venezuela. The US does not generally seize ships on the high seas based on vague "Iranian connections", because you are not pirates). The ship is "subject to seizure" as a matter of US law, because the US made a law which applies outside its territory. As a matter of international law, it probably isn't. (There are some technicalities here because most of the flags of convenience used by oil tanker operators are US client states - the situation where the US seizes a Liberian or Panamanian-flagged ship and the country of registration doesn't object is messy).
Regardless of legal technicalities, the policy here is seizing ships which export Venezuelan crude. That is the essence of a blockade. Is it an act of war? The Trump administration is deliberately blurring the distinction between peace and war here.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
The US is seizing tankers transporting Venezuelan oil in international waters close to Venezuela with neither the ship nor the cargo having any connection to the US. In plain English this isn't sanctions, it's a blockade. The US carefully avoids saying this through official channels, although Trump has used the word in social media posts.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
It does not sound like he policed things such as gambling problems or household debt the same way he did affairs,
Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.
It does sound like he was using his position to enact a personal view, in firing executives based on his sentimentality toward marital fidelity and/or sense of personal loyalty toward him. Many would say this is unethical, unlawful even—in breaching a director's fiduciary duty toward shareholders when it comes to maximizing shareholder benefit. And this is on top of the aforementioned weird intrusiveness into his employees’ personal lives.
Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.
Ultimately, it's a "just-so" story. One could similarly argue that male executives who have extramarital affairs are more valuable employees, as they have a Demonstrated Track Record in Leveraging Core Competencies to Think Outside the Box for Alternative Growth Opportunities.
Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.
On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.
Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
It's also reclamatory when used by Anglos (like @ChickenOverlord?) in Japan - like rappers saying "nigger".
Racial slurs (and other slurs) cut differently when the context means that the possible meanings include "You are a member of my outgroup and I consider you sub-human" than when they don't.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Are the old men "monopolising" the prime-age women? I'm not sure I understand the mechanism if so. They all work in the same office building. The women are - I hope - permitted some choice in their mate.
Baxter is still single at 30, and the implication is that (as a reward for being an effective movie-plot protagonist - not by right) he ends up with Fran who is (a) used up and (b) from a lower social class than him. The women of Baxter's own class and age (within the context of the movie, this means the secretaries) are unmarriageable because they are busy fucking the bosses. From Baxter's perspective (and therefore the audience's), the women in his dating pool are being monopolised by the execs. The implication is that if things had gone the way the execs wanted, he would have remained unfucked until he was eventually promoted to the grade where he could have multiple women himself.
In real 1950's America, Baxter would be married to a woman of his own social class in his early twenties, and she would probably have been faithful to him.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
arguing over definitions.
Guilty as charged. Fundamental to my position on trans issues is that the concept of a "gender identity" as used by transactivists is probably incoherent, and if coherent does not describe a real thing. That requires trying to clarify the definition of a concept whose authors made it deliberately slippery in order to support motte-and-bailey arguments.
There is a much saner argument you can have about trans issues if you conduct the argument in terms of generally accepted concepts. Some men want to live as women (and vice versa), and potentially take drugs and have cosmetic surgeries to allow them to do so more effectively. Should adults be allowed to do this? (Default answer given the basic assumptions of Western liberal society is "yes" on the usual liberal grounds) Should children? (Head exploding issue in western society - there is a vast class of issues about how the State as parens patriae and the actual parents share authority over and responsibility for children who are too young to effectively exercise their own freedom and we don't have satisfactory answers.) Should people who do this be protected by anti-discrimination laws? (marginal - it's about as strong a case for the T as for the LGB)
But that isn't the argument that the trans movement want to have. I'm not the one who made this about the meaning of words - it started when a powerful political movement tried to make the meaning of the word "woman" a central political issue.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.
I don't think this list particularly works apart from the Musk companies. Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend and I don't think I am an outlier. Apple use contract manufacturers. Most of what I streamed on Netflix when I had a subscription was not Netflix original content, which mostly sucks. I can't comment about BYD and Xiaomi specifically, but one thing everyone who writes about the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem says is how much of its edge comes from the ability to buy intermediate inputs in a friction-free way because someone else is making them just down the road, and is happy to take on a rush order.
That said, "big companies are internal planned economies and their existence partially refutes the socialist calculation argument" is old hat - Coase wrote The Nature of the Firm in 1937 and Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State in 1967.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
The point of "cis-by-default" is that most people don't have a "gender identity" in the sense that transactivists use the term. (Google AI provides the definition "Gender identity is a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, or another gender..." which I think is consistent with transactivist use). I don't have an internal, deeply felt sense of being a man - I just am one. The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.
I think the concept of gender identity is incoherent and nobody has a gender identity - some people have preferred gender roles that don't match their biological sex, and some people have fetishes which mean they can get off by performing a gender role that doesn't match their biological sex. But if tomboys and femme queens think they "really are" the other sex it is because transactivists tell them to, not because they have an "internal, deeply felt sense of being..."
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
The official languages of Hong Kong per the Basic Law agreed between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping are English and "Chinese" with no version specified. Government documents are issued bilingually in English and standard written Chinese. This is supposed to be equally legible to speakers of any Chinese language because written Chinese is non-alphabetic, and is similar but different to the "written Cantonese" used by Hong Kongers for ordinary written communication or the Putonghua (written Mandarin) now taught in mainland schools. The government will conduct spoken business in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all three spoken languages are taught in schools, although "written Cantonese" is not.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Interesting piece of movie anthropology, although almost certainly inaccurate as anthropology of the real PMC of that era - everything I have read says that graduate-class men of that era mostly married a college sweetheart and stayed married.
The mating system being described here is gerontocratic polygamy - young men can't get laid because old men (the combination of seniority-based promotion and up-or-out meant that the age-based and rank-based meanings of senior and junior were very highly correlated among men on the management track in the same company) are monopolising the prime-age women, and then they get to have multiple prime-age women when they are old enough.
This can be stable if younger generations are larger than older generations (due to population growth or a high young-adult death rate) so there are enough women to go round. I remember reading an economics paper which pointed out that the highest positive bride-prices in the world (dowry is a negative bride-price) were in African cultures which practiced gerontocratic polygamy, and provided a model justifying this. Of course in the hypothetical sarariman/Moral Mazes example of the system the men don't die, they either fail out or get reassigned to the Peoria office and marry a local.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
If I had to give a tl;dr answer to "Why are women not getting married and therefore (unless chavettes who are happy to reproduce while single) not having children they want?" it would be a lack of marriageable men. Below-average men are in a much worse state than they used to be, and in a worse state than below-average women - the women who are being asked to lower their standards and settle really are being asked to make (and largely refusing to make) compromises on e.g. employability that their mothers didn't have to.
Why 90-100 IQ men are worse husbands in 2025 than they were in 1955 is a more complex question, which involves some or all of changes in education, blue-collar job markets, working-class male institutions, and gender roles.
But the key point is that this is a problem that lives in the interface between men and women - the problem is that respectable working class and marginal working class women are unwilling to settle for the actually available men. In a sense it doesn't matter if the men got culpably worse, the men were damaged by bad public policy, or the women got pickier - the point is that (given the continued existence of monogamy norms and the unwillingness of the political right or the median voter to subsidise bastardy more than we do already) the first step in raising fertility is to unf*ck the marriage market in a way which changes both sexes' behaviour.
There is a separate problem with middle-class and above women marrying too late to complete their desired family size, and ending up with 1 kid instead of 2 or 2 instead of 3 because of age-related infertility. Again, fixing this - i.e. getting professionals to marry earlier - is about changing social norms in a way which changes both sexes behaviour, not about blame placing.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
The experience of foreign companies doing business in China is not this. China absolutely uses threats to Apple's supply chain in China as a tool to influence the output of Apple TV in the US, as an example.
Or to put it another way, "Openly provoking China" sometimes includes saying things which are patriotic boilerplate in your home country.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.
The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
FLDS violate a lot of federal (and state) laws about polygamy, rape, statutory rape etc. The outside world considers this victimful crimes against their own women, and is appropriately (given our own moral standards) outraged. So FLDS largely have to live sub rosa.
The only victimful crime Haredim commit is rorting the public fisc*, which a lot of Americans wrongly consider victimless when done by someone sympathetic. They can do this openly as long as their political machines can provide them with cover.
*Not just welfare fraud - Haredi-controlled municipalities like Kiryas Joel and the Haredi political machine in NYC commit a much larger range of rorts, many of which are technically criminal.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Isn't this just a matter of sex ratio? The denominator in TFR is the number of women and ignores men. Societies as a whole have a 1:1 effective sex ratio, so this doesn't normally matter when comparing. But individual communities which don't reproduce biologically can have unbalanced sex ratios. Oil towns and military base communities have a lot of surplus men, so if the limiting reagent for family formation is mostly rather than entirely female, then they will naturally have more kids per woman.
In Western culture, polygyny and bastardy are (very) low status, and the main reason women give for having fewer children than they claim to want is a lack of quality men to have them with. If this is even partly true, then it is obvious how "have enough spare men around that all women who want kids can get a man who wants kids, and a crappy woman can nail down a mediocre man and a mediocre woman can nail down a decent man" increases births-per-woman.
I suspect something similar is going on in the other direction with collapsing Mormon fertility. Monogamy norms are even stronger in post-1904 Mormonism than in the wider society, and the Church has a problem with male defection meaning that the sex ratio is female-heavy. Anecdotally, babies-per-marriageable-couple is still high among Mormons, but babies-per-woman is falling off a cliff as not every woman can get married.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Not many career violent and property criminals nowadays - in a world where TVs are cheap, stolen phones get bricked remotely, and people don't carry large amounts of cash it isn't lucrative enough, particularly compared to drug dealing or online scams and fraud. In addition, sentences for repeat offenders are still harsher than they were in the Hippie Era such that you can't just write an occasional week in jail off as a cost of doing business.
There are specific niches where you see career property criminals, like shoplifting in San Francisco and fencing it on Facebook Marketplace, or pickpocketing tourists almost everywhere, but nothing like the situation in the 1990's where you could make a career as a burglar or mugger. Ask a beat cop or a local politician in a high-crime area and they will say that most property crime nowadays is committed by junkies who need cash fast for their next fix.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Given that my wife is 45, was subfertile, and is now properly infertile after a botched IVF cycle when we tried for a third child that way, there would be loud rejoicing, expressing thanks for a miracle.
I do not think I am particularly unusual in thinking this way among older parents.
Straight women can get physical affection from female friends without it being weird, whereas men can only get it from immediate family members or a sexual partner.
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