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I don't understand the people criticizing Biden for pardoning Hunter. Who would let their son go to jail? Is not a parent's truest role to protect their children?
Maybe you have to let him rot if he had committed murder or another horrible crime. But Hunter was convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms. Nothing mortal.
Would anyone here actually let their son go to jail for this stuff. I feel like you would have to be a sociopath to do that to your own kid.
It's Monday. The next thread is going to go up in a couple hours, I think you'll get more eyes on the conversation if you post it there instead.
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If I thought the prosecution and sentencing was legitimate then absolutely. How is this even a question?
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What about all other dudes convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms? Everyone understands that parents want to help their children as much as they can, but imagine a small-town deputy busting a rave and arresting the sheriff's son for drug possession among others. If the deputy let the kid go the scandal would be small. But the son was arrested, booked into jail, everyone arrested accepted the plea bargain, the judge even gave everyone the same jail time. Then the sheriff announced that he's going to build a jail extension. On his property. In his house.
It's corruption, but it's not even a scary form of corruption. He couldn't release him and "lose" the paper trail, he couldn't get the charges dropped, he couldn't threaten the jury. He sat and watched as everyone learned that his son is a user and then exercised his power in the most pitiful way.
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I have a level of sympathy for someone trying to protect their family, even in this context. Like Camus said, between my mother and justice, I pick my mother.
But let us not blind ourselves here, Biden did not do this solely because he so loves his son. He did it in part because he wants to prevent the next administration from investigating his own money laundering shenanigans. You don't get credit for sacrifice if you're saving yourself.
Also he broke his own oath not to do this, whilst nobody forced him to commit to that. This should be reason enough for opprobrium.
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Because he explicitly said that he wouldn't pardon him.
And because rule of law requires everyone to be subject to the same laws, and not to have members of the ruling family treated differently. America is a republic, not a monarchy where the president has the divine right of kings.
This isn't a case of the president correcting an obvious miscarriage of justice, as pardons are generally used in the free world. This is pure corruption/nepotism. It is, dare I say, Trumpian.
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I would love to see a Twitter-style poll with the following options:
A) Keep Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
B) Keep Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
C) Repeal Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
D) Repeal Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
I'd love to see not only percentages, but some mental models from the people in different categories. This in inspired by seeing both Zvi's latest on the Jones Act and MR linking one estimate related to possible Trump tariffs.
Zvi doesn't sum it up super nicely, but estimates I see of the value of repealing the Jones Act are \approx 3% reduction in cost of goods (just due to the flagging effect) and a claim that a plausible OOM estimate is \approx 3% GDP increase (I lost the thread the other day on how to put approximately signs in without strikeout). The randomly-linked twitter post estimates price increases due to tariffs mostly around 2-3%, with some specific sectors rising up to 13%.
I suspect that most people just don't mentally look at economic estimates and compare them to each other, but I don't know what else goes on in their heads. If they're trying to justify one or the other position, how do they go about it? Is it at all plausible if we apply their justification to the other question?
Finally, heresthetics. Could an 'omnibus' option (D) bill be pushed, saying, "That old, bad, just banning stuff style protectionism clearly failed; we shot ourselves in the foot and didn't even manage to actually protect an industry in the process. Instead, tariffs will be the way; at the very least, taxes are slightly more pleasing to the economist than specific bans, as they still allow price signals to work somewhat and inspire new solutions, while at least collecting some revenue for a debt-strapped gov't"? Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?
Option C) is the choice of Elite Human Capital.
Just good classical-liberal economics 101.
This is really unfair. I think the classic-liberal economics view here is:
Sounds like we agree?
Broadly yeah, but I think there's some nuance here. One can flatten the classically-liberal economic view to (C) but I think most (?) would readily acknowledge that if shipbuilding is a genuine matter of national security then we should do something. Just not either of those things.
IOW, the CLE view here is less about ends and more about means.
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I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position. If the drag on prices caused by the Jones Act is not worth the benefits then we should repeal the Jones Act regardless of whether we implement tariffs that have a similar effect on prices. Similarly, if we think the benefits of tariffs would outweigh their costs we should implement them regardless of whether we repeal the Jones Act. I don't see how the two policies are linked except rhetorically.
I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act! Instead of replacing one drag on US prices with another we should just get rid of the bad drag on prices.
What’s so frustrating about this topic is that there is almost Zero chance it’s addressed by the government, even under trump. It’s too niche. Too many incumbents. Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.
Why? What would that accomplish? DoGE is a joke, powerless to accomplish anything. Malcom Kyeyune:
David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni in the New York Times (archive link):
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Curtis Yarvin:
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Getting something on Elon or Vivek's "radar" will do you no good. It's not "the only way," there's no way at all — at least, not within the system and the confines of the law. DC cannot be fixed, it can only be defeated, destroyed, and replaced.
What else is there to say except "we shall see"? I would note that everything you quoted before Yarvin is well known to Musk and Trump and has been discussed at length, and was a large part of project 2025 - they do have plans to deal with an entrenched and uncooperative bureaucracy.
As for what Yarvin said, I just think it's premature to laugh off Trump's plans before he's even in office, mainly because he won the election, secured funding for the border, escaped impeachment, pulled out of the Paris accords, met with North Korea, put an embassy in Jerusalem - my most consistent recurring memory of the 2016 cycle is "Hahahaha Trump is such a fucking moron, can you believe this chump? He can't just... Oh holy shit he did it!"
Only sections of the wall were built, most of the Mexico border wasn't secured.
The goal was to get them to give up nukes and that didn't happen. Hanging out with Kim Jong Un isn't a big achievement in and of itself.
Both were claimed entirely impossible. I'm not saying Trump can do no wrong, I'm saying actions that are impossible for the blue tribe are not necessarily impossible for the red tribe and vice versa. Also activist media claim the possible is impossible when it impedes their agenda.
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He didn't escape impeachment, he was impeached twice.
Apologies, please bear with me while I readjust to the motte's language norms. He was acquitted following his first impeachment is what I meant.
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Relatedly, these people also probably said you can’t build a rocket ship company or an electric car company. Doesn’t mean Elon will succeed but…I try not to bet against him.
Hope you didn't lay money on twitter!
I don't know if this is what you meant, but there was actually a lot of money to be made by betting against Musk during the Twitter acquisition saga: What seemed like an open-and-case of "you have to buy the company you committed to buying" was trading at a steep discount, seemingly only because "It's Elon, anything can happen".
I'm referring to the entire twitter saga, but probably mainly the additional value lost under Musk's ownership.
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I’m not sure the Twitter purchase was always a financial one by Elon. In any event, most people predicted Twitter would fail after Elon cut a bunch of people. It didn’t. Elon was right on the business aspects. Assuming advertisers come back (which it seems they will) it actually wouldn’t surprise me if he makes a little money off of it.
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Interestingly, I don't think one actually does reason to this position. Instead, someone makes a declaration and it forces people to reason out of it, but the rhetorical linking of the two issues significantly limits how they can reason out of it... and what that will mean for their preference ordering between all four.
This is where the heresthetian thrives. He finds out how to exploit the different groups, who have different preference orders. There's only a small group of hardcore pro-Jones Act folks, yet we still have it, because enough other folks will hold their nose enough at the economic issues in order to not do anything that might seem anti-union (as Biden is portrayed in Zvi's writeup). By linking the two things, even if only rhetorically, the goal is to split the groups with incompatible preference orders. If you can split the A/B groups enough that you can accomplish C (your stated preference after encountering it in this form), then that's a yuge dubya.
Others might have other rationales that end up with them having different preference orders, but if people like you can find yourself having mildly not caring about the Jones Act before but now being willing to throw it under the bus to stop tarifffs, society benefits immensely.
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Tariffs would not impact Alaskans trying to export crab to Los Angeles.
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I don't quite understand why the Jones act failed, I'll admit. It seems like there should have sprang up in response lots of American owned short haul freighters.
I guess what I'm saying is, is the root causes of the Jones act failing one of those things that can be addressed?
What /u/gillitrut said, but also the interstate system in the US is pretty good and it turns out to be cheaper[1] in a lot of cases to put stuff on a truck.
[1] Cheaper than a Jones Act vessel, more expensive than a notional free-market vessel.
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I have the belief that there is a limited amount of ambition and engineering expertise per capita that ultimately caps the technology level. I think a bunch of industrial tech levels have only been maintained by the ascendancy of China. No ambition or real engineering talent has been directed towards building ships in the US since the 1940s.
So basically we have a bunch of people focused on the world of bits instead of atoms?
China still can't build a jet engine the way CFM, P&W, GE or Rolls can.
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Generally, yes. There are areas where America does do well enough at physical manufacturing to be an exporter. Weapons, medical devices, cars, planes, etc.
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But why can't we own ships that were built in China or Japan or Germany or wherever? The USA has money and shipping companies.
On top of being American built, the ships must also be crewed by Americans.
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The Jones Act requires the ships be built in the United States.
What is the actual definition of 'built in the United States'? Does it actually prohibit towing in a ship from a Chinese or Japanese shipyard and installing the transponder in LA or wherever and calling it 'American Made'?
There are detailed and specific rules. Their way around it usually involves assembling a kit of stuff made in other countries.
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Yes, Zvi's post links to an article that discusses it some. There's a certain (large) percentage of the ships parts that have to be fabricated in America. It also discusses a court case where a shipping company tried to buy a pre-fab "ship kit" from South Korea and just assemble it in America. A court ruled that was not Jones Act compliant.
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Apparently, the law does not provide a definition, so the Coast Guard's regulations control.
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It turns out that it's cheaper to hire whatever vessel to do a journey like domestic port -> international port -> domestic port than it is to hire (or build) a Jones Act vessel to do domestic port -> domestic port.
That would be cabotage and is illegal under the jones act. Fortunately goods are fungible and we can just import a foreign produced equivalent of whatever we just exported.
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I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.
It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.
How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.
What do you think about the Trump tariffs? I'm really curious about how these things interact.
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This doesn't really seem like a good argument for keeping the Jones Act. If we're not good enough at making ships, why not just throw in the towel? You wouldn't pooh-pooh the nation of Haiti for importing computer chips instead of trying to make their own, it'd be foolish to expect them to just magically have the physical and human capital needed to do so.
Haiti is a small shithole country that, last I checked, was controlled by a cannibal who barbecued people. They're so incompetent and disorganized that the Presidential Palace still hasn't been repaired after an earthquake struck in 2010.
The US is a huge, highly developed country with aspirations to world hegemony. They produce plenty of advanced technology. Why can't they find the physical or human capital to build ships efficiently? How hard can it be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports
The Italians can do it. The Germans can do it. The Finns can do it! White people spent about 500 years clobbering the rest of the world because we had better ships, the US relies on its navy for relevance in world affairs. This planet is 75% water. Shipbuilding is not something that can be sacrificed.
My point is that you can't simply will your way towards robust institutions and the necessary human capital through saying "Be Tough" on the subject. Either you have an actual plan to achieve the thing you want directly, or you admit it's beyond you for lack of time or resources and turn to alternatives. We have allies who presumably do know a thing or two about how to build ships and maintain the industries needed to build those ships, and if needed, we can just rely on them. Hell, why not let the Europeans build us some warships and we can count that towards their contributions towards NATO, assuming that's still a hot subject?
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There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
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Jones act came was passed 104 years ago. Clearly it isn't working to make American shipbuilding great again at the moment. How long are you prepared to keep it and wait around for it to cause the golden age of American shipbuilding - 104 years more?
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We currently have the Jones act. We currently do not have a healthy shipbuilding industry. The Jones act appears to have been passed in 1920. The Jones act is not doing anything to get us a domestic shipbuilding industry. I do not see any prospect of state intervention at the scale necessary to get us a healthy shipbuilding industry. Given that, we should repeal the Jones act.
I would gladly consider supporting the reintroduction of the Jones act as a section of a bill that would, in fact, revitalize US shipbuilding. Until then, all this attitude - and it's an attitude that's shared by many people in GOP policy, it's not just you - does is hurt our economy for precisely no benefit. I do not see any harm in repealing it until that happens.
The US had a healthy shipbuilding industry in 1940, such that it could produce the biggest fleet in the world, fight and win huge wars against rival great powers on the other side of the world. 20 years of Jones Act protection didn't do much harm. I think the Jones Act is a symptom, not a cause. High US wages were already making it difficult to man a large US merchant marine back in the 1920s, hence protection. The problem is not enough protection, not smart enough protection, insufficient and inefficient subsidies, insufficient automation.
Why don't companies move into shipbuilding on the basis that there's huge latent demand? Is a wholly protected US domestic market seriously too small to support shipbuilding? The US has the second longest coastline in the world, a bunch of islands and hundreds of millions of consumers! Does the US lack the capital to build shipyards? Is there a shortage of skilled labour? Is there some huge thicket of laws preventing efficient shipbuilding? Unions? Some combination of these?
I doubt the root causes of the problem will be resolved by killing the Jones Act. All that will happen is political backlash from massive job losses and a modest increase to economic efficiency. But without protection, there is no chance of competing against North East Asia (who have the capital, economies of scale, labour and best practices already established). Without protection, there is no chance of ever revitalizing US shipping since there will be nothing to revitalize.
Shooting the patient in the head does reduce medical costs but it's not really a cure.
Okay but I think we should be realistic and note that a massive and unusually competent policy intervention targeting American shipbuilding is really probably just not going to happen. So in the meantime, the Jones act is just unneeded loss. And if it did happen, it'd necessarily be a much larger undertaking than putting the Jones act back in place, such that additionally reimposing the Jones act doesn't make it much harder to do. So I think in the meantime we should repeal the Jones act and gain the 'modest increase to economic efficiency'. And, from what I've read though I haven't checked it, the benefits really aren't that modest relative to other policy interventions. It's really hard to move gdp even by .1%
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As far as I know river and coastal shopping in the US has been in decline for a long time. Particularly the great lakes: we don't move iron ore and coal (and limestone) like we used to. River shipping in the Mississippi is mostly barge these days I think.
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
I do know that the US coast guard has gotten absolutely retarded about crewing requirements, at the same time as crew recruiting and training is going to pieces in the same way it is for air traffic control.
Europe on the other hand has a lot of cheap hulls and crew from eastern Europe.
No, it's literally the Jones act. Look at how energy gets into the northeastern US. A huge part is provided by Canada, just because that bypasses the Jones act (and because they have legacy pipelines and transmission lines - and the blue states up there keep killing any new projects of that kind). Which, by the way, makes energy prices kind of a problem for the Northwestern states when the tariffs come.
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Us shipyards already pretty much only make warships, and only ocassionally pop out a hulk for making trips to hawaii and puerto rico. Maybe the problem is that shipyards only know how to make warships and transfer that waste over into their civilian vessels.
According to google:
That's the total number of vessels in operation, and China builds that many ships in a week.
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I also fully support US shipbuilding for security reasons.
I do think we can do a lot better in terms of crafting a policy that does so without the distortionary effects that the Jones Act does and in a way that's fundamentally more fair.
Part of the issue to me is that the Jones Act imposes the cost of maintaining a national shipbuilding industry in a completely non-uniform fashion. And because it applies only to domestic routes, it effectively penalizes domestic trade within the States (especially Alaska, which is ridiculous given its criticality) in factor of foreign trade with other countries.
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I generally agree. Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling. There's about a hundred other things that are equally or even more important for renewed US maritime self-sufficiency, but which are one or more of the following:
There's also a few extremely critical differences in the manufacturing sectors you highlighted where the US is competitive:
Rockets: There was a massive, underserved market that wanted to put payloads in space, but which could only do so at incredible expense, with extremely limited launch frequency. SpaceX commoditized and accelerated payload delivery, granting them near-total monopoly on world demand for space launches, before the competition even got out prototypes. They give high-status nerd jobs to an extremely overproduced market of estranged aerospace engineers, and use their status to pick top talent away from low-pay positions in government that are regularly threatened by cyclical party politics. Most of their flights are uncrewed, and the crewed flights carry literal astronauts - that talent pipeline isn't running dry any time soon, particularly when global demand for astronauts is countable on one hand (provided you count in binary on your hands... which is a normal thing that other people definitely do). The military isn't making demands that SpaceX build their rocket entirely out of US unobtanium, because they tried that with NASA and it went well enough to result in SpaceX existing.
Contrast with shipbuilding: the market has many competitors with decades of experience, most of the market has no comparable binding restrictions on material or labor sourcing, and no one enters the industry for nerd street cred. It's now a massive uphill battle just to gain a foothold in the market, and anyone trying has to face pressures that just don't exist for SpaceX.
Fighter Jets: The US spent decades pouring money and talent into the production of fighter jets and selling them to allied nations, justifying the expense by pointing at the hostile foreign superpower doing the same; then the hostile foreign superpower collapsed. It has taken decades for any credible competition to re-emerge in the market, and arguably we're still not there. Notably, fighter jets are also unambiguously weapons, in fact high-tech weapons, with all purchasers being militaries trying to gain substantial competitive advantages over adversaries - it's not a race to the bottom on cost. Even if the materials and technologies are highly exotic, the cost is currently bearable, the volumes of exotic materials required are relatively small, and the procurement process is at least partly designed around this requirement.
Contrast with shipbuilding: we don't sell aircraft carriers, we might sell a handful of submarines for the first time ever to Australia in a decade as an explicit attempt to block Chinese naval dominance in the Pacific, and we don't even have enough capacity to build or maintain our existing fleet well. Recent military shipbuilding efforts have been somewhere between a total mess and an absolute disaster, with projects running over-budget, over-schedule, and suffering from early cancelation or non-functional key armaments. We just flat out aren't competitive on non-military vessels.
Cars: This one's easy - a big chunk of the manufacturing is done outside of the US. When competitors got better at cars, we forced them to manufacture those cars in the US or face steep import tariffs. Cars are multiple orders of magnitude less expensive than ships, creating economies of scale. They are commodities for domestic transport, and are indispensable for a substantial fraction of the country.
Contrast with shipbuilding: if the US demanded that all ships docking in a US port had to be made in the US or face steep tariffs, I predict exactly zero foreign shipbuilders would set up shop in the US. There's no economy of scale without volume, and there's just not enough US ship volume to justify that expense compared to the global volume of shipping. The tariffs would just be passed on to consumers, either directly at ports or indirectly overland through Canada and Mexico.
A closer analogy might be nuclear power plants. We used to build lots of those, but the one-way ratchet on the regulatory framework imposed some frankly ludicrous requirements on new and existing projects, making it almost entirely unprofitable to bother in the present time (even after a majority of the national security concerns have evaporated). We subsequently lost all industry knowledge and experience, except for a tiny military niche. A handful of startups have concluded that the only way forward for the technology is to deliberately eschew the major advantage of nuclear power - scale - because it is no longer economically possible to scale. And now a competitor superpower is credibly focusing national effort on generating their own nuclear power industry.
I'm reasonably confident that the legislative gridlock and ephemeral executive alignment of the US has rendered us structurally incapable of ever solving this problem again - by the time we figure out how to set a national agenda that is durable to half-decade pendular political cheap shots, we will have been thoroughly eclipsed by China, and on the way to our own steady decline and stagnation much like most of Europe. My best-case reform package for the Jones Act is too heavily dependent on so many other reforms and re-industrialization efforts that will simply never be.
So true. I spent 2007 to 2011 on board a two decade old Navy minesweeper that was supposed to be replaced by the littoral combat ship (LCS) which entered service in like 2012 I think.
But LCS was such a disaster that it was not capable of any of its basic missions, and the first few have already been decommissioned while my minesweeper is still in service!
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It's critical to distinguish 'DOA as a result of contingent political arrangements / coalitions in today's politics', and 'DOA under most possible political arrangements / coalitions'. I don't think port automation is the latter!
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What are the "world issues" of our age?
I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.
Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?
Tikkun Olam.
Speak plainly, and refrain from low effort Dark Hints.
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The common theme is that these are developing issues that involve a lot of uncertainty about the near future. They are salient to young people today and learning to navigate these issues will be helpful to their futures.
Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.
For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.
Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.
So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.
Even if the first premise is true (big caveat), we'll have to look at how an increase in consumption scales when isolated from wealth. Because we'll run into fun non-linearities pretty much immediately.
For a very slight increase in your "consumption of housing", you can get a massive increase of your living standard - because for close to the price of rent for a shitty apartment, you can afford the interest on a mortgage. Sometimes, this could even mean a decrease in consumption allowing you the quality of live jump of renter --> home owner.
For another increase ("only" double digit percentage) in "consumption of housing", you can decrease your commuting time by >100 hours per year.
Especially at the lower end, food quality also scales non-linearly.
And of course, when comparing two subjects with equal consumption, the presence of wealth makes a huge difference in the feeling of security in life.
In all three metrics (consumption, income, wealth), statements like that make little sense. In the end, only quality of life matters. But that's notoriously hard to measure.
Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.
Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.
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A few years back, there was a "splashy" "study", which surveyed people, showing them three pie charts. One was a depiction of the wealth distribution, by quintile, in the US. Opposed to it was a completely equal distribution, 20% for each quintile. Conveniently, in the middle, they put "Sweden", and they asked folks which wealth distribution they'd prefer. People were at least smart enough to realize that a totally equal distribution makes no bloody sense, as an indebted fresh medical school grad is not going to have the same amount of wealth as a nearing-retirement saver-of-forty-years. Nevertheless, it allowed them to blast in the media that however much percent of the population surveyed would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden, heavily implying that the US should adopt some unspecified set of policies that people associate with Sweden.
...but of course, this sensationalism was entirely built on a complete lie. "Sweden" was not Sweden, at least not its wealth distribution. They called it "Sweden", with quotation marks attached in the original survey, because they simply lied and substituted Sweden's income distribution and compared that to the US's wealth distribution. If you looked at Sweden's actual wealth distribution, it would be extremely visually similar to the US, so they needed to lie and make people think that there was the magical possibility that is totally magically achievable that is visually clearly different if we only let them implement whatever haphazard collection of policies they want.
The average person's intuitions about what a "reasonable" wealth distribution should look like are totally unmoored from reality. Imagine a country full of people who all earn the same income, save the same percentage of it, earn the same return on their investments, retire at the same age, spend down their retirement savings at the same rate, and die at the same age. Literally just people living the exact same life with staggered birth years. Show the average subject in that "Sweden" study a pie chart of that wealth distribution, and he'll say it's way too unequal.
I could go on for pages and pages about how stupid wealth inequality discourse is and how little sense the way people think about it makes.
Dan Ariely, the lead author of that study, was recently at the center of a huge fraud scandal for some unrelated research. The data he used were definitely manipulated, but I guess he managed to convince the investigators that someone else did it and he didn't know. I have no basis on which to doubt that finding, but I haven't seen the evidence.
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.
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Climate change.
I didn't used to believe in this, and I'm still, say, maybe ambivalent? But I do think there's a real chance that we start seeing some serious shit in this regard in the near future, trends that happen slowly and then all at once.
There's no real chance we start seeing some serious shit - we are already seeing serious shit. 2024 is the hottest year on record, beating out... 2023 for the top spot. Corals all over the world are bleaching and dying and we're already seeing temperature zones marching away from the equator and towards the poles.
I highly recommend the following article, because I think it is the most reasonable take on the issue that I've seen. https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
I recommend reading 'Apocalypse Never'. The coverage of climate-related injuries to ecosystems in the media is inadequate. Journalists are not neutral at all, nor are they competent.
And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that. The fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that- fantasies.
Perhaps so, but at those times there probably weren't cities of millions of people lying more or less at sea level.
There are entire countries built below sea level now.
If the sea level were to raise by 50 m over a few centuries, people could deal with that.
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Did you even read the article?
The points you're raising have already been brought up and dealt with. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse Never, but from reading the back of the book and how it talks about climate activism not being effective that's actually a point raised in the article itself:
Furthermore...
Compare that to:
If you want to have an actual discussion about the merits of the article and Greer's position I'm here for it 100%, but you have to actually argue against what he's written rather than just some imaginary gestalt of all the articles on the climate you've read in the past. Telling someone that "fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that" doesn't even reach the level of being wrong when the person you are talking to has explicitly criticised apocalyptic fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects in the essay you're trying to attack.
I skimmed it.
And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.
Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.
He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.
Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.
Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.
You didn't read it and your critiques have no value because you do not understand the position you're attempting to argue against. You're not engaging with the material being presented, and you don't even seem to understand the underlying reasoning. Even beyond that your position is an incomprehensible joke - "Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history." Did you even read your own post? Dying is actually something most people consider to be a problem!
Sure, I'm willing to read it - though I probably won't be finished by the time this thread is dead, which is why I gave my reply after reading about the book and not after I'd finished reading it. But John Michael Greer has been making this exact point for decades now! He has written multiple articles explaining why the environmentalist movement has failed, how it failed and what people can do to move on in a world shaped by that failure. He explicitly and overtly attacks a lot of the scams like Goldman Sachs' carbon pricing scheme and even in the essay you refused to read he explicitly points out that the entire environmentalist movement has done absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of carbon emissions.
If you're going to complain about someone being a noise generator, take a look at yourself - you spouted a whole bunch of nonsense because you couldn't even be bothered reading a single essay while expecting me to go read an entire novel.
I'm going to raise the flag again by saying we can massively prevent the impact we, as a species, have on the climate if we nuke every single industrializing nation and ensure nobody ever goes past subsistence farming. During COVID, China saw relatively clear, pollution-free skies.
I mean that's a non starter, especially when the climate feel-gooders realize how it looks when you notice all the people that would have to accept an energy-poor non-industrialised serf future are various shades of brown, but, you know. The planet's at stake.
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John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.
If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/
I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.
Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.
Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.
This was JMG back in '08
It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.
Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.
Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.
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There would have to be some sort of discontinuous break for climate change to have a serious effect on human civilization.
People keep on predicting that climate change will cause more famines and storm deaths. But, over time, human deaths from famine and storms have been going down, not up. Human capacity to deal with the climate increases far faster than the climate changes. Unless the world deindustrializes, there will never be another Bhola cyclone which killed 300,000 people in 1970.
Climate change predictions often call for a 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP due to climate change in the next 50 or 100 years. Frankly, this is small potatoes. And furthermore, it's quite easy and cheap to mitigate the worst effects of climate change if we cared to do so. (We don't).
That's not to say climate change isn't bad. It is. It will have many negative consequences for the natural environment and may cause some species to go extinct. This is bad and we should strive to prevent it.
But humans will be fine.
The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".
It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.
I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.
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Yeah, climate change isn't a "threat of human extinction" type of problem (unless we're missing something big and Venusy, which is far-fetched), but I could see 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP being a serious underestimate. The theme I keep seeing in climate change predictions is devaluation of land. A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.
It's going to be very gradual on a human time scale. How gradual? Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.
The cities won't move, but lower lying areas will see marginally less development over time, so the population center of the cities will gradually shift inland. In extremely valuable areas like lower Manhattan, there won't be any retreat, just more money spent on land reclamation. Amsterdam and New Orleans are already below sea level.
Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.
Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.
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Climate Change policies are a series of scams.
Politically, the European version uses climate fearmongering to push through renewables and energy austerity because the end result was purported to be energy autarky and an end to being easily blackmailable through hydrocarbon blockades.
The American version is the same, except the motivation is more along the lines of keeping people poor because poor people are less likely to build stuff.
The climate modellers of course have their institutes and their salaries and budgets.
It's a harmful policy being pushed under false pretences and is of course wholly ineffective because people will be merrily burning coal elsewhere by the gigaton. Since 2007, world coal use has increased by a gigaton despite all the efforts.
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The emerging second Cold War?
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AI. Can relate to how students should be taught to write given AI, and what work will be available when AI gets even better and we get cheap robots.
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The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.
The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?
Not only did the world not reach peak oil in the late 2000s as predicted, but US production grew so much it is now 30% above its prior 1970 peak.
I'll venture that we really will reach peak oil in the next decade, but not because of lack of supply (we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it), but because of lack of demand.
We never ran out after all.
Kind of. The increasing and more volatile price of oil motivated the development of fracking technologies, which have a higher upfront cost but about the same marginal cost as previous wells, allow previously unexploitable fields to be made exploitable, and allow wells to be turned on and off with macroeconomic realities. So increasing prices signalled need, and the technology was developed to fill that need.
Which is probably a good estimate for the trend that will occur in other domains of resource exploitation, as long as we allow price signalling to work.
As a side note, it looks like gasoline prices are almost monotonically decreasing when adjusted for inflation. I suspect this is because the price of energy is basically what sets the value of the dollar. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/
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There's an author I like (David Mitchell) whose novels are all loosely connected and part of the same universe.
His first big hit and arguably his opus, Cloud Atlas, had a section set in a post-apocalyptic earth. Within the book, the end of industrial civilisation comes about due to peak oil. In 2004 when the book was written this wasn't an unreasonable thing for someone like Mitchell to believe.
Unfortunately, since all his books are within the same universe, he then revisited how the end of civilisation came about in his 2014 book The Bone Clocks.
This leads to the situation where the characters watch civilisation die around them in the 2050s because they are running out of diesel.
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The big thing that the environmentalists got wrong is that it's basically impossible to run out of a resource. Nothing that we extract gets annihilated.
The resource simply gets more and more expensive, in the worst case, or you find new ways to extract it more efficiently, in the best case (as what happened to oil). And in the worst case, the higher prices lead to development of substitutes and more efficient usages - as always, high prices are the cure to high prices.
To be fair to peak-oilers their argument was always that peak is different from running out and the danger is what oil getting more and more expensive would cause to the global economy and society.
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This seems like saying the same thing in more words (not always a bad idea!).
Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of. In that case, the different between ‘running out’ of something and ‘no longer being able to do many tasks that require it because it’s too expensive and there’s no good replacement’ is essentially semantic.
That's kind of assuming the conclusion. The fact is that high prices incentivize finding substitutes for lower value applications of expensive commodities.
It is assuming the conclusion, that’s what I mean. The peak oil argument is that we were given a limited gift of irreplaceable resources and we’re splurging it all on junk. The tech optimist argument is that we can basically use as much stuff as we want (indeed more is better) and if there are supply problems we’ll find a way.
Obviously, in the former view, you will eventually run out of everything that is not self-replacing. In the latter, you can never run out of anything. But the existence of appropriate substitutes is a factor beyond our control.
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Those are all still excellent subjects - just not in the ways the authors envisaged. Talking about the failures and successes of AID efforts in Africa; of COVID policies, of the persistent backfiring of foreign aid, the corruption of the UN, BRICs strategizing and world supply chains, etc.
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AI, mass immigration and cultural fragmentation, the power of political Islam, low birth rates, the risk of biologically engineered pandemics, the effect of social media on population psychology. Not stuff most high schools are going to want you to spend all your time discussing in class.
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I think this is one of the dumbest possible critiques of this policy. The simple answer is, "whatever happened when a man went into a ladies room in 2000." Which, quite simply, is if they did their business in a quick and non threatening manner, nothing happened. Maybe some women would look at him askance or ask him if he is lost. Only when said man started ogling women and girls, whipping out his junk, etc would security be contacted. And such is a perfectly reasonable enforcement mechanism. On top of that the bright line rule, is very convenient as an escalation or extra charge for the police/prosecution and as evidence of criminal intent.
Think you responded to the wrong top-level.
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Assuming you're not allowed to go completely off the rails from the curriculum, each of the topics you mention can be a natural hook into more current issues.
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I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
The 70’s saw left wing bombing campaigns on U.S. soil.
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The 60's and 70's were absolutely that polarized, as were the '50s for some conservative groups. Things were always both wilder and more normal than you think in the past.
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The problem is that the woke-vs-Trump split is absolutely impossible to discuss dispassionatly in a classroom. My own position ('a pox on both your houses!') (which is obviously very dispassionate, neutral and objectively correct) would likely earn me fire from both of the big factions.
It has been said that Politics is the Mind-Killer.
The thing about elephants in the room is that sometimes, acknowledging them will cause them to rip your head off (metaphorical elephants, at least, I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful), so it is much safer to tiptoe around them and confine your lecture to elephants which are safely in another continent.
Of course, you want your students to engage in political discussions about stuff which actually affects them, not the politics of of the French revolution, but you also want them to have civilized disagreements and arguments, not to start killing each other.
Pick a topic which students have feelings about, but which is not partisan-politics-coded. i.e. daylight saving times -- it is safe, if slightly boring. Every student has to deal with them (or their absence), but few will pick that as their hill to die on. Local issues.
No they are not. Elephants are very dangerous animals.
Way I remember from the last time I did research, elephants are in the top 20 (or is it top 10?) killers of humans, but a lot of those are accidental. Some elephants (especially adolescent males) deliberately target humans, especially in retaliation for humans killing elephants ... but I remember one story where some young elephants drank from some barrels of fermenting alcohol on the outskirts of a village, got super drunk, and destroyed the village in their drunken rampage.
So, uh, mostly peaceful but simultaneously way more dangerous than the majority of animals humans are likely to interact with in general.
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Fiery but mostly peaceful elephants
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I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.
So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.
In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.
I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.
I agree with one of your main points--people don't engage in the local politics where they have the most impact--but I disagree that political discussions are powerless. Let's take the trans issues in particular:
In my experience, whenever trans issues come up in person (so not with strangers online), the discussion serves a very important social function: my social circle is coordinating understanding of how to appropriately act/react if someone we know says they're trans. If my social circle cannot come to a single view on the matter, at least we get to identify who feels strongly about the issue and in which direction, and then act accordingly.
And, in my experience, the way such conversation don't start out with "So and so is trans, how should we react?". They start out as "I heard [some news item about a trans-person]...", followed by a qualified personal reaction. Talking about people who we don't know provides an important emotional distance, even if it's a topic someone is passionate about (one way of another), to feel out where other people stand.
Take my Liberal suburbanite friend Judy, who has a twelve-year-old daughter. Judy starts the conversation with "I heard about that High-school teenager in [another state] who assaulted a girl in the girl's bathroom." Then we do a verbal dance around trans rights / sexual assault. Once Judy is satisfied that I know that she's in principle for trans rights, and she heard me make appropriately qualified noises about protecting girls from predators, only then she brings up how there is this trans kid in her daughter's class and her daughter now doesn't go to the bathroom between bells but instead keeps asking for a hall pass during the class after lunch, and the math teacher brought this up and an issue during the parent-teacher conference last Wednesday.
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Perhaps more important than Russia falling and China rising is Russia and China getting friendlier with one another. The Sino-Soviet split was a major factor in the Soviet loss of the Cold War; now, Russia and China are becoming a single anti-American bloc again.
Both yes and no. There is still popular anti-Chinese sentiment in Russia, and as American missiles strike targets in Russia, you find American rap playing on Russian radio stations, not a single Chinese song can be found
I mean, does China have pop music that's popular anywhere in the world outside of China? I can go on youtube and find videos of rap, rock, country, and pop music concerts aping American artists in most major countries, speaking a variety of languages; American artists are extremely popular in Europe, Latin America, Africa, etc. I'm unaware of any Chinese equivalents.
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China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.
Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?
Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.
Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.
Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.
For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.
I think China is a self-limiting issue. Its population is aging and shrinking. Its diplomacy is nonexistent: you can name multiple countries in the G20 that consider American problems their own. Does China have any friends? Russia and Pakistan are allies of convenience at most.
North Korea kinda sorta?
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We are literally in a proxy war with Russia right now and regardless of whatever happens with their conventional forces, they still have thousands of H-bombs.
Though I agree fully with your main point, China does overlap into everything else - tech, energy, trade, politics...
100,000 dead or so the Russians have isn't the end of the place. Arguably the 300-500K dead isn't perhaps even the end for Ukraine, as they're largely older people and they'll be able to preserve their independent western/central Ukraine without a doubt.
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I...kinda feel like by the same logic that China is The World Issue one could argue that The United States is The World Issue.
I definitely think it's good for people to know about China and whatever they happen to be up to, and I agree that whatever it does impacts the world. But that's also true of the United States, the EU at a minimum, and I'd think Russia and India as well.
PS –Russia conventional [ground] forces now are stronger than they were before the conflict (as per statements from US DoD officials.) It's plausible that they will end up being more important to the Course of the Next Century than China.