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laxam


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 07 03:11:29 UTC

				

User ID: 918

laxam


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 07 03:11:29 UTC

					

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User ID: 918

It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.

The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.

The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.

Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:

(g) Definitions

In this section:

(1) Controlled by a foreign adversary

The term controlled by a foreign adversary means, with respect to a covered company or other entity, that such company or other entity is—

(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;

(B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or

(C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

(2) Covered company

(A) In general

The term covered company means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that—

 (i) permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content;
 (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
 (iii) enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content that can be viewed by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application; and
 (iv) enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

(B) Exclusion

The term covered company does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.

(3) Foreign adversary controlled application

The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—

(A) any of—

 (i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
 (ii) TikTok;
 (iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
 (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

(B) a covered company that—

 (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
 (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
   (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
   (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

(4) Foreign adversary country

The term foreign adversary country means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.

And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:

section 4872(d)(2):

(2) Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—

(A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;

(B) the People’s Republic of China;

(C) the Russian Federation; and

(D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.

If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.

The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.

Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.

I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.

Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).

Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.

As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.

Yeah, there's that, too. We are not Elves and we cannot have their life. We are Men and the fading of the world of Elves leaves us to build our own paradises.

There's a chapter in Anna Karenina where Levin, the lovesick landowner and sometime friend of Anna's brother, returns to his estate after trying and failing to win the heart of Kitty, a young woman who is still too caught up in the thrills of court life to take him seriously. While there, there is a scene where he assists his tenants with harvesting the grain, spending most of a day just working side by side with them. Tolstoy describes this experience like next to nothing else he describes in the whole book, lauding it in a way that almost feels utopian. You can feel Tolstoy's agrarianism shine right through.

I've never found the idea that paradise involves no work very convincing.

Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others.

I remember reading Lord of the Rings growing up and thinking the Shire sounded like paradise. I'm not exactly surprised to find people who don't think so exist -- I knew this, there are people who like the city --, but finding that there are people who think of the Shire as an example of a bad thing is a little funny.

I live across a river from the hospital I was born in, five miles from the house I grew up in (well, one of them, anyway -- we moved a lot when I was young, but always in the same county. My father chased the housing bubble upwards), and, while the old rural character of the place is mostly gone and paved over by suburbia, enough of it is left that I love it here and have no desire to ever leave. I've married a girl I met in college, most of my immediate family lives within a 45 minutes drive, and I pretty consciously chase stable, salaried employment that provides dependable income and doesn't ask too much as far as travel or flexibility.

The funny thing is that I'm actually from an area of the country that is otherwise very much like the 'coastal elitopia' the guy found out he prefers, just far enough out on (what used to be) the edges of the suburbs that you can still see the shimmer of the rural past in the ponds and the creeks. The small towns are still small (even if they're expensive and trendy and surrounded by miles of SFH neighborhoods), the parks are still pristine (even if the bike trails are getting more defined and nature outside those parks is disappearing, at least in this part of the county), and the job market is healthy enough that I don't think I'll ever even have to leave (even if my wife wants to move to Europe someday -- we both want something like Bavaria, which is pretty much exactly like here but with less tract housing and better beer).

I guess my only quibble is with the word 'essential'. It's not crazy to think that, absent the national distractions of the Depression and the War, something along the same vein would have happened even earlier. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly organized and I'm of the opinion that another important factor was the prosperity of the post-war era. The foundations for that prosperity were lain in the massive productivity gains of the 30's, so an alt-40's where the Depression and the War don't happen could well have seen an alt-Civil Rights movement.

The Cold War provided an impetus, but it was one of many and not an essential one.

The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.

While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.

By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.

...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?

No, inflation expectations across every horizon remained low in 2020 and only really started to go up after Biden's spending spree got off the starting line in 2021. Remember Larry Summers being pilloried for pointing out that the ARPA spent more stimulative dollars than the size of the output gap by a large amount at that time?

The early Biden administration's spending explosion stimulated the economy enough that the Fed's late 2021 plans to start tightening became very out of date for the actual state of the economy. If they had tightened earlier (so, March-April 2021), there might have been no serious inflation but there also might not have been any serious inflation if Republicans had kept the Senate or the White House and not passed the huge spending bills of that year.

I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.

I don't know that you can really call it vitriolic hatred, but they certain didn't think highly of him at the time, while he was in office.

The truth is that there is a certain segment of the Left that has and will hate any Republican President whatsoever, under the pretense that they're an incipient authoritarian dictator. Truman accused Dewey of being an American Mussolini.

It's just word associations.

That seems to be a substantial portion of all political communications these days. A huge portion of politics (including political 'news', which is usually essentially just propaganda for one side or the other) is finding some way to put two things on a shelf next to each other, one thing universally agreed to be bad and another an unrelated politician, political party, or political idea, and just go, "Eh? Eh? How about it? They're like, right next to each other!"

It's pretty obvious that Hawley either doesn't understand or thinks his audience doesn't understand (and thus doesn't care about making shit up) what Section 230 is about.

Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.

Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.

The problem the anti-democracy crowd have is that Libertarianism is incompatible with any other alternative, too. It's always in the interest of those with power to limit the liberty of someone. This is why non-anarchist libertarians tend to like governments of 'limited and enumerated powers, with checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in one branch'.

A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.

Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?

And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.

The other Arab states couldn't care less about Israel. The Baathists were the only ones who ever actually disliked Israel at higher echelons of government and Saddam is dead and Assad has got bigger problems to worry about. The monarchies occasionally make anti-Israeli noises for their populaces but otherwise don't give a damn, Egypt has been sucking on the American military funding teet in exchange for peaceful relations with Israel for so long that the mask-for-money has become just standard Egyptian policy, and other Arab states are too distant to actually be bothered.

The IRG is a few hundred thousand personnel. If 'a few layers' was more than a couple of thousand people I would be shocked.

The point is that the Israelis aren't actually a source of instability in the region, except in terms of their relationship with the Palestinians. Get rid of the latter and you've solved the problem. Get rid of the former and you've still got a problem because they're a radicalized Islamist population which hates all of their neighbors.

Then add a few layers of IRG command structure to the kill list.

Who said anything about invading?

Kill the Guardian Council, the President, the top layer or two of the cabinet and the IRG, and tell the people who were trying to overthrow the government because of the overreach of the morality police that they're in charge now and leave the place to its own devices.

Seriously, OP talked about stabilizing the Middle East. The Oil Princes just want to make money, the military in Egypt wants more or less the same, the Turks just want to be able to play regional hegemon, and the Israelis just wanna feel like they won't all be killed for letting their guard down. It's the Iranian government that throws a wrench into the works. Get rid of them and break the back of the IRG and there's no longer going to be anyone who cares enough to spend time destabilizing other countries (and the Arab world will be all too happy to quietly wash their hands of the Palestinians).

If you break them up into conjugal family units, you can even get some cultural change going.

If Western governments had the reach to mobilize the failed protest movements Iran has had over the last decade, we'd have just overthrown the Guardian council and been done with it.

Dunno, but Iran has had several waves of very large scale anti-regime protests. I think you could prevent something exactly like the Mullahs taking back over if you just hand the government over to the right people. Iran isn't really like Iraq, it's a more developed place, even with the sanctions.

Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.

The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.

Maybe. There's probably still more going on than just those particular problems. The theoretically correct answer is that the virtue of the people themselves has declined, so we elect men to Congress who will not govern well regardless of the structure you place them in. This is an appetizing enough answer, although certainly not itself complete.