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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1591 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 27, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is software getting better? (for me default point of comparison is 2000). Programmers often say that later languages with higher level abstractions even if slower, allow to do things faster or do things that were previously not available.

Encodings problem (you know if you're use any languages besides English) is not anymore due to UTF-8, but it's not because software is better it's because hardware is better and Unicode is now a standard. LLMs and language translation (even before LLM) are much better now, but it doesn't seem that it has anything to do what newer languages offer. How do I use Shazam to find song that isn't playing now, but from some recording? I heard advice to use another phone and put one's phone speaker near other's microphone. If I watch youtube and get foreign word that I do not recognize, how would I feed it to, say, 5 different speech-to-text engines?

There is, say, Haskell with its lazy evaluation. Does it mean that if user accidentally triggered something resource heavy and cancelled immediately, it won't spend resources? of course not...

Yes but it needs taste. Go is nicer than C, python is nicer than perl and bash and php. Command line apps are blazingly fast.

Slack is built upon a tower of abstractions and it does have more functionality than IRC. It could have been better but the tower of abstractions means it was created faster.

As I mentioned the other week, my girlfriend and I recently watched the miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. On Friday night we sat down to watch episode 7, and found it so absorbing that we wound up staying up til 4 a.m. to finish it.

I was particularly intrigued by how the series presents one of Simpson's defense attorneys, the (in)famous Johnnie Cochran. The portrayal is nuanced: the series doesn't shy away from acknowledging his philandering and accusations of domestic abuse, nor depicting the various underhanded techniques he employed in trying to secure an acquittal for Simpson (redecorating Simpson's house to mislead the jury into thinking Simpson is a pillar of the black community; during cross-examination, speculating on the basis of nothing at all that Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman may have been murdered by cartel members); but also depicts him as a tireless advocate for black civil rights, who takes on OJ's case specifically to call attention to police racism and misconduct within the LAPD and within American society more broadly. It doesn't hurt that Courtney B. Vance gives probably the best performance in the show, effortlessly capturing Cochran's black-preacher charm and flair for the theatrical.

All the same, I couldn't help but think this portrayal was sort of - white-washed? From what I've read of the real Cochran, he strikes me as every negative stereotype about cynical, dishonest lawyers rolled into one, who took on OJ's case first and foremost to enrich himself (both directly in his fees from OJ, and indirectly in the trial's publicity making him into a household name) and secondly owing to what we now euphemistically call "in-group preference" i.e. racism. I don't think (as the show seems to imply) that the real Johnnie Cochran thinks that black men who have actually commited heinous crimes ought to be punished, but that the American justice system is so riddled with racism and white supremacy that it is impossible for us to have any real confidence that the evidence mounted in their prosecution was not compromised, planted or coerced. That, at least, is a defensible position, and arguably more defensible in 1995 than today. But I don't think that's what the real Johnnie Cochran thinks, or thought at the time: I think he thinks that OJ is black, therefore he should not be sent to prison (certainly not for murdering two white people; maybe he'd think otherwise if OJ had murdered someone close to Cochran) and any methods are justified in trying to accomplish that goal, no matter how dishonest or underhanded. I think the show was essentially sanewashing the real Cochran .

Am I being unfair to Cochran? People who know more about the real man than I do, do you think that's a reasonably accurate characterisation of his worldview?

Johnny Cochran was primarily a civil lawyer who focused on civil rights cases, and his approach to the Simpson case was as a civil rights case rather than as a typical criminal case. In any criminal investigation, particularly one as complicated as a murder investigation, there are going to be mistakes, and it's par for the course for the defense to highlight these mistakes as a means to sow doubt in the minds of the jury. Rather than presenting these as unfortunate errors, however, Cochran was able to craft a narrative that these all flowed from the racism inherent in the Los Angeles Police Department, at a time when such racism was fresh in the minds of the black community.

Consider the behavior of the police from the very beginning of the investigation: Within hours of the crime scene being discovered, the police found it necessary, in the middle of the night, to send four detectives to Simpson's home to personally inform him that his former wife had been murdered. While there, after it is evident that Simpson is not home, the find a reason to enter the property anyway and, surprise surprise, find incriminating evidence. There's an explanation for this that makes sense, and that the prosecution explained, but to someone predisposed to distrust the police it certainly looks like the police zeroed in on Simpson as a suspect well before there was any reason to believe he was involved, and they never seriously pursued any other line of investigation. Then you add all the other mistakes and irregularities and it can certainly look like the police, at best, were so dead set on Simpson's guilt that they didn't bother to conduct a competent investigation, or, at worst, actively manufactured evidence against him. It also didn't help that the detective who discovered key evidence, including the evidence that gave the police justification to enter Simpson's property in the first place, had his own checkered past with regard to racial issues, a past that he actively concealed in court.

The prosecution may have been able to counter this somewhat had they recognized the problem and sought to counteract it, but they were so convinced that the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore that they didn't consider that Cochran could easily give the jury reason to ignore it. They presented the LAPD like choirboys who wouldn't possibly do anything like Cochran was suggesting and couldn't possibly be driven by any motives other than a dispassionate analysis of the facts (though for their own part, the police were less than forthcoming when it came to providing potentially damaging information to the prosecution, as if the problem would go away if they ignored it). When this information came out during the trial, the damage had been done, and the prosecution's half-baked attempts to cover for it were too little, too late. In any event, the suggestion that the LAPD was totally not racist ran contrary to the experience of every black person and Los Angeles, and wasn't going to play well with a mostly minority jury.

In the aftermath of the verdict, a narrative developed among the prosecution team and others that Cochran was trying to convince the jury that acquitting Simpson would somehow be tit for tat payback for the acquittal of the Rodney King defendants. Much criticism of Cochran in the years since stems from this theory. The problem with it is that it presupposes that the jurors aren't just wrong, but are also bad people, that even if they had a videotape of Simpson murdering Brown and Goldman that they would have acquitted anyway. I don't believe this is true, and I don't believe that's what Cochran was going for. If you want to get an idea at what Cochran was going for, read the actual closing argument. He goes through the holes in the prosecution's case and only then discusses how they may have been the result of racism or apathetic bungling. He never suggests what his worst critics do.

Part of the mythology of the OJ Simpson trial is based on the idea that the prosecution had an absolute slam dunk of a case. They didn't. The biggest problem I saw with the case was the timing combined with a lack of blood. The prosecution presented a tight, but plausible, timeline between the murders and OJ getting into the limo. But when you consider the amount of blood that would result from stabbing two people to death, including one who was nearly decapitated, it makes it implausible that the perpetrator would be able to avoid getting blood on themself. In all, police were able to extract less than a drop of blood from the Bronco and no blood from the inside of the house. That someone who wasn't a professional hit man was able to stab two people to death, one of whom was younger and stronger than him, and make it back in a tight window without getting much blood anywhere seems highly unlikely. I'm not an OJ truther or anything suggesting that he's innocent, just that there was good reason for a jury to be skeptical of the story the prosecution was telling them. When you add in the race stuff it cast doubt onto what little blood evidence there was, and a that point it's hard for me to see how he gets convicted.

a narrative developed among the prosecution team and others that Cochran was trying to convince the jury that acquitting Simpson would somehow be tit for tat payback for the acquittal of the Rodney King defendants.

Including members of the jury themselves: "In the documentary O.J.: Made in America, juror Carrie Bess said she believed '90% of the jury actually decided to acquit Simpson as payback for Rodney King'." One of the jurors gave OJ a black power salute after the verdict had been rendered.

police were able to extract less than a drop of blood from the Bronco and no blood from the inside of the house

They found Nicole and Ron's blood on one of OJ's socks in his bedroom.

The question was about Cochran, not the jury. And I left out the bloody socks because they come with their own problems, but suffice it to say that one would expect to find more in a house with a white tile floor and white carpeting than a sock with a single drop of blood on it. This only played into the defense theory that evidence had been planted.

This is a bit tangential to your actual question, but it’s a point I’ve never had the opportunity to bring up here. People forget the extreme degree to which Detective Mark Furhman wrecked the prosecution’s case. It’s often remembered and reported that he took the Fifth Amendment when he was cross-examined, but no one talks about the fact that he took the Fifth when asked if he planted evidence in that specific case. That’s huge. It’s a giant red flag to the jury when the lead murder detective won’t answer whether he literally framed the defendant. Now I suspect OJ actually did do it, and that Furhman was just paranoid about his already looming perjury charges and was just Fifth Amendment-ing everything. Or maybe he engaged in some fairly standard (at the time) touching up of the scene to strengthen the case, like moving the glove to a more incriminating location in the alley, or daubing some of the victim’s blood onto OJ’s Bronco. But if I was a juror, the fact that the lead detective can’t say whether he planted evidence is pretty much already enough reasonable doubt for me to acquit. And when you keep that in mind, a lot of Cochran’s loopier theories about preservatives in the blood samples and the glove not fitting suddenly start to sound a lot more plausible and carry a lot more weight. Please keep that in mind before thinking of the jury as a bunch of dumbasses.

Also I highly recommend Season 3 about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I thought it was very underrated. Clive Owen should have won an Emmy for plying Clinton, that’s a role that’s very difficult to play without turning it into a Saturday Night Live sketch. And Beany Feldstien might initially seem like poor casting for Lewinsky but she does an amazing job.

Did you watch much of the actual trial? It was broadcast live. It was a daily topic of conversation amoungst my friends at the time.

How about that Mr. Fung?

I was born too late, but I'm rather curious now.

It was a cultural moment, sadly. The late night shows had parady songs and dancing Judge Itos.

The low speed Bronco pursuit overshadowed a David Hasselhoff pay per view concert live from Trump's Castle.

Somewhere there's a video clip of Rosa Lopez saying, 'El Bronco blanco.'

In a better alternative timeline Ron and Nicole are still alive, OJ is remembered for football and acting, and David Hasselhoff stardom was even greater.

I heard a young person describe the Depp–Heard trial as the Simpson Trial of their generation and, no. Not even close. Those who weren't around for it don't understand how big OJ was, because it's unlikely anything will again be as big for at least another few decades. I got about 50 channels at the time and the trial was always on 3 or 4 of the channels, and sometimes it was on most of the channels. Minor figures like Kato and Rosa Lopez were household names. I found a book about the murders in a garbage can within a month of them, seemingly not enough time for a book to be written let alone published, read, and discarded.

The only other crime in American history that generated a comparable level of interest was the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that was in the 30s. I think that after a media circus to that degree the media and public as a whole take a step back,.and it can only happen again once anyone old enough to have any real memory of such an event is too old to have had any involvement with the coverage. Maybe once everyone who covered the OJ trial is retired and the zoomers are running the media machine, we'll get a case of similar interest, but I think this is the kind of thing that can only happen once every 50 years or so.

Agree with this.

I know some people who point to the OJ chase or trial as one of their first concrete memories.

Nothing since comes anywhere close, not even any of the BLM adjacent trials.

Let's say I enjoy the writing style of court opinion excerpts like Wilkinson in Owners Ins. Co. v. Walsh and Wilkinson in Abrego Garcia v. Noem.

Does anyone have either a) a repository of other similarly-written court opinions, or b) one-off examples?

I was having a conversation with someone about how rich people or large corporations being able to afford the best lawyers gives them a massive advantage in leveraging the legal system as a weapon against smaller actors. My instinctive naive solution was to enact a rule that any legal expenses must be matched by an equal donation to the opponent’s legal fund. The idea being that if you genuinely believe the law is on your side, you shouldn’t have to outspent the opposing side by X million dollars to prove it. Supposing this rule magically came to be, would this actually solve the issue and are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?

Alternatively, suppose the US had a true two-party state (instead of just a de facto one, since it gets more complicated with more than two opposing factions). Would an analogous rule for campaign contributions (any contribution to Democrats must be matched by an equal donation to Republicans and vice versa) work to reduce big-money influence in politics?

The side that believes more strongly in its case will pay all the legal fees.

It's a much bigger problem than this: Most laws favor the entrenched & powerful by default unless very carefully designed not to. This is one reason why large companies often are neutral or even actively lobby for extra regulation. THEY can afford a large legal department for compliance. Smaller competitors, not so much. This is completely independent of whether a law is also deliberately designed to boost specific actors.

And it gets worse once you consider politically entrenched powers. A new law to limit political donations to specific parties in the vein you are considering? Well, WE are only unaffiliated NGOs defending democracy, YOU are obviously a thinly veiled campaign contribution, so all money spent on you needs to be added to the fund of our the other side!

Turns out, helping the genuinely weak compete is pretty hard. Usually you just end up helping a different faction of elite. And even if you design a law that helps bring down a powerful actor, the same law can often be used to bring down anyone, which means it destabilises the entire system.

If you subsidize lawyers, you'll get more of them. There are already way too many lawyers in Anglosphere countries.

https://www.americanbar.org/news/profile-legal-profession/demographics/

The largest increase in lawyers occurred in the 1970s, when the number of lawyers jumped 76% — from 326,000 in 1970 to 574,000 in 1980.

WTH happened in 1971 may well have something to do with lawyers.

What’s the advantage of this over ‘loser pays’?

Personal injury lawyers would take a haircut, but I think that’s a good thing. The ghetto lottery should be harder to get.

To the extent that more expensive lawyers are actually better at winning cases, it reduces the role of raw monetary advantage in deciding who wins.

To the extent that the costs of defending a suit are comparable to the costs of prosecuting one, it reduces the effectiveness of intimidation suits.

A 'loser pays' system still allows the rich to apply significant stress simply by suing someone without the resources to mount a proper defense and in some situations would even doubly screw over the defense if they lose more due to weaker representation rather than by the merits of the case.

To the extent that more expensive lawyers are actually better at winning cases, it reduces the role of raw monetary advantage in deciding who wins.

Loser pays doesn't prevent lawyers representing poor clients with strong cases working on contingency - in fact loser pays is complementary with contingency fees (called "conditional fees" in England) because the contingency only needs to cover the "uplift" over a regular fee to compensate the lawyer for the risk of not getting paid, whereas US-style contingency fees need to cover (in expectation) both the basic fee and the uplift.

Supposing this rule magically came to be, would this actually solve the issue and are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?

If you get sued, does this rule still apply? In other words, does the defendant have to supply money to the plaintiff's legal fund? Because if so I think patent trolls get 100x worse with this proposal.

The troll could also be his own lawyer, or basically subsidised by him to "bring him work".

Doesn't the plaintiff need to hire lawyers to draw up and file the case? I fully admit to ignorance here, but I imagined the plaintiff as first-mover, so they would pay an amount for a legal team to create a suit and deposit the equivalent amount for the defendant to hire a team an create a response? Any extra the defendant spends must be declared and must be matched for the plaintiff to spend, then this repeats iteratively?

Yeah. Patent trolls acquire portfolios of vague patents, and then mass-file suits against companies that might plausibly be argued to be infringing those patents, in the hopes that the company settles to make them go away. Filing is cheap for the plaintiff (patent troll).

If the defendant (the company accuded of infringement) fights the case, they have to spend a ton of money on expert witnesses, discovery, etc.

Under this proposal, the defendant would, in addition to the usual expenses, also have to contribute to the patent troll's war chest.

If the patent troll and the legal firm representing them, you could end up with the following situation

  1. Patent troll cheaply files hard-to-defend suit, contributes $500 to defendant's legal fund
  2. Defendant decides to fight case, spends $100,000 on expert witnesses and discovery, then contributes $99,500 to plaintiff's legal fund
  3. Plaintiff spends $99,500 on the firm they hired to drag the case out as much as possible and otherwise do whatever they want at astronomical rates
  4. Plaintiff loses their meritless case
  5. Situation is
    • Plaintiff has lost $1,000 ($500 on filing fees, $500 on defendant'slegal fund)
    • Defendant has lost $199,000 ($100,000 on expenses, $99,500 on plaintiff's defense fund, minus the $500 received from plaintiff)
    • Plaintiff's legal team has made $99,500 doing a few hours of easy work
  6. Plaintiff's legal firm kicks back $50,000 to plaintiff under the table.

The plaintiff gains $50,000 every time they file and lose a case in this system.

Is the burden of proof not on the plaintiff? I thought it was almost always intrinsically harder to prosecute a patent case than to defend. Broadly, aren't differences usually easier to spot than similarities?

Of course, kick-backs of any sort would have to be heavily regulated and harshly punished.

Is the burden of proof not on the plaintiff? I thought it was almost always intrinsically harder to prosecute a patent case than to defend

It is fairly hard to prosecute a patent case and win if the defendant fights you. But if the defendant doesn't defend themselves pretty easy to win, it's a civil case so the standard is preponderance of evidence not beyond a reasonable doubt (disclaimer: ianal).

Of course, kick-backs of any sort would have to be heavily regulated and harshly punished.

Why don't we start with getting this proposal implemented robustly since it seems to be a hard prerequisite, and see where we end up at that point?

are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?

Define "legal expenses".

The first thing I'd do if faced with those rules is outsource everything from the law office. Instead of the lawyers hiring a forensic accountant to review the accounts, the accounting department would hire them and provide the report to the lawyers for free. Instead of lawyers hiring a mock jury, the marketing department would hire a research panel. If you allow splitting hairs enough, then the compliance team does legal research and provides it for free to the litigation team.

Even without deliberate dodging, large corporations simply have a lot of those resources available from other departments, and the incremental cost to get the lawyers that information is near-zero.

You'd need a set of ancillary rules for these kinds of loopholes with additional regulations on lawyers to maintain papertrail records "showing their work" and some sort of audit system in place. Indeed it may be that no effective system to prevent this kind of activity exists, but I'd hope the core rule at least makes it marginally more difficult to just overwhelm someone by outspending?

The danger with that is that the line is blurry. If you're too strict, then Joe Random gets gifted ten million dollars just for filing a lawsuit against Google, because they have corporate-standard recordkeeping, auditing, and accounting which is helpful to lawyers.

How about as long as materials are shared in full (i.e., not cherry picked) to the opposing party, the relevant expenses do not need to be matched? Seems about as enforceable as insider trading rules?

Then all that information is practically public. I don't think that's a very palatable solution.

Supposing this rule magically came to be, would this actually solve the issue and are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?

Even more incentive for lawyers to drag everything out forever.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Lovecraft and the Iliad. Trying Postman and Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

I finished Alastair Reynold’s Absolution Gap. There was a lot to like, but it was extremely confused as a novel. More thoughts to follow.

Currently reading The Fool Lieutenant, Bob Edlin’s autobiography of his time with the Army Rangers. Writing is a bit more amateurish than some of the memoirs I’ve read. This doesn’t detract from the charm and/or awe. We’re talking about a guy who was shot in both legs on Omaha Beach because he wouldn’t stay down after the first one. Then he spent two or three months in the hospital before shipping himself back to his unit and participating in the rest of the liberation of France. Tremendous badass.

I bought my girlfriend Mina's Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa for Christmas, which she loved and urged me to read. About a third of the way through and I don't know where the story is going yet. Pretty cool that one of the main characters has her own pet Moo Deng which she rides to school every day.

The Neon Court (Matthew Swift #3) by Kate Griffin. Fun series, I'd probably love it even more if I were a Brit and I might absolutely adore it if I were a Londoner. Or perhaps in that case, I'd think it was shite.

Pictures at a Revolution about movies in the 60s.

Casino Royale. No corny gadgets so far, just plot, characters and setting.

The film is the only one of the Daniel Craig Bond movies I've seen. I rewatched it in January and found it held up quite well (Mads Mikkelsen, in particular, is magnificent). Curious how it compares to the source material.

That's pretty much why I chose it, I like reading the seminal pieces of genre fiction to see how they compare to their popular depictions.

Unfortunately the subsequent Bond films slowly regressed closer to the mean and I gave up on them entirely after watching Skyfall.

I thought the last Daniel Craig film, No Time to Die, was surprisingly quite good. Not amazing or anything but very solid, some memorable chase scenes and action, good actors, good enough plot. Some people hated it because Bond dies at the end but I thought it was a good send-off for the Craig series of movies.

It stays pretty close to the plot of the source material. The only major changes are geopolitics updates (LeChiffre is a terrorist financier rather then a KGB agent), and making up excuses to actually have action scenes. This makes it pretty rare among other Bond movies, which usually range between loose adaptations (Goldfinger), very loose adaptations (Moonraker) and “we just grabbed the title and made up our own plot” (most of the rest of them).

It's been years since I've read Casino Royale but FWIW, ISTR coming away from it thinking that the movie was a good overall adaptation of the book.

Decent book. Primal spy novel with Fleming's distinctive, somewhat cheesy cold war sentiments. Different feel from the films which made it worth the time, but I can't say that I craved a sequel.

Some lines in that book are interesting to read in 2025. In particular how Bond describes his desire for Vesper.

To be fair, a lot of Fleming’s writing was considered unusually puerile and trashy even contemporaneously.

While this seems true, arguably this was from literary circles, who would also have panned amy number of popular novels for the masses.

I'm thinking specifically about the "sweet tang of rape" line. Don't get me wrong, I've read all the Bond books except The Spy Who Loved Me ( I couldn't handle the jarring perspective change). But that line sort of sticks in the head.

Books on investing with dubious looking covers. They're good though. The old idiom applies.

Edit: idiom is the wrong word. :/ Should have said proverb or adage.

Weingartner's

Is this the same one who’s the head of the American federation of teachers?

Nope, this one's Charles. It's an old book (1969) on the inquiry method.

What AI is the best for combing the Internet and synthesizing opinions without hallucinating? I'm a teacher trying to edit together compelling but accurate video montages using clips accurately depicting content. These clips can come from works that are overall inaccurate or of mixed accuracy. I don't have time to find and watch all potentially relevant movies (and many are not in English) and can't be an expert on all subject matter, so I need AI to scour the Internet and synthesize me a list of these movies and scenes so I can take them. Which AI would be best for this? The children will thank you!

You can look into Pictori AI, Runway (Gen-1 & Gen-2) and Descript for generating videos using stock footage or your own clips.

You can use OpenAI Sora or Runway Gen 2 to generate videos from text or image inputs.

As far as scraping the internet and using those videos, that's kind of problematic for legal reasons.

I'm not trying to scrape the Internet for video; I can find the videos/clips myself. I just need to know what's regarded as accurate so I know what to track down.

Claude has web-search option, and it's reasonably good. I have a paid subscription plan ($20 per month), so I am not sure whether that option is available for free.

Not a clue, sorry, I've never done it. Perplexity AI is a name I've heard but no idea if it's any good.

What preparation if any have you been doing for the possibility of tariffs?

I've bought approximately five pairs of sneakers in the past two weeks, to try to get ahead of potential supply disruptions on the one brand of sneakers that actually fit my weird wide flat feet.

New Balance? I have a weird wide flat foot. As a teen, New Balance was the only brand that fit me. And I haven't bothered since then to try any others, so I'm curious if your one brand that fits is the same as mine.

I stocked up on durable goods before the election, so now I'm mostly maintaining my stockpile.

New Balance

They are also the only main stream brand that has size EE across almost their whole product line.

Width D is almost always too narrow for me, yes even if your band claims to have a "wide toe box." Especially if you have flat feet, shoes are also too narrow around the arch. Width 4E is apparently for people with crazy hobbit feet, where they feel like they are wider than they are long. My experience is like 95% of shoe salesmen will try to tell you you'll be fine with D or 4E. Why would I be asking if you had EE if one of those would work?

The minimus was the perfect sneaker for me circa maybe 2013, but like a fool I only bought one pair and by the time I needed another pair, they'd changed them and they no longer fit when I went to buy another pair. But I found a company on Amazon that makes a knockoff that is almost the same, and actually does a lot of styles in the same last, so now I bought several pairs for fear of losing it again.

None. I think the impact of tariffs will turn out to be wildly overrated. I have no actual empirical basis for that belief or an articulable mechanism, I just kind of don't believe that Nike is actually going to have more than a marginal price change. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my current stance is that "tariffs don't work" will be even more true than many people believe.

I tend to agree on predictions of long-term apocalypse.

Where I'm concerned is about specialized, low volume, low price items that aren't high prestige. At work we're stockpiling parts for obscure old machines. I'm not worried about Nike raising prices on popular shoe lines, so much as about companies folding altogether or consolidating SKUs.

Assume that the Congress decides to impose universal age of consent in all states. And pull from their ass the authority to do it. What do you think the current culture war coalitions and factions will push for and will it create intracoallition splits.

Hardline Religious conservatives hard - 21 with exception for marriage
Moderate Religous conservatives - 18
Centrists/liberals - they will look at Europe and see that the world didn't ended and probably say that it is 16 with romeo and juliet clause
Feminists - probably a split here - some will push for maximum, other for 16
Andrew tate fans - hard 14
Anime fans - soft 14
LGBTQ+ - a spectrum based on the how activist they are ranging from 16 to 12.

No idea about how will it go based on race and income

It's progressives, generally speaking, who dislike "child marriage" being legal (which usually means, you can get married at 16 or 17, provided that a parent or the court system signs off on it being fine). I don't think that this is accurate.

The culture has been pushing for later and later ages. Most people seem to assume it's already 18 and I sometimes see people arguing for 25.

Thus, returning to the original no-tech biology-based standard: 0 for men, infinite for women (except when married).

The cultures that think there should be that age of consent are the only ones that think an AoC should exist in the first place (the liberals are, famously, much less likely to think it should exist in the first place, or if it does they argue for 10-14 for “they should be allowed to have it when their bodies tell them to seek it” reasons- traditionalists confuse these guys for progressives all the time because “muh 70s” though).

They’re mostly arguing over small details, like the uniform you have to wear to fuck young boys (some people see this more traditionally- teachers, clergy (but I repeat myself), but progressives also consider men wearing dresses and certain skin colors to be one of those uniforms; and “allowed” as in they judge their mission to be so important that the correct amount of tolerable abuse by these people is not 0) and who the balance of power in a relationship must ultimately rest with (man for traditionalists, woman for progressives, a minor distinction given an equal society).

Hardline Religious conservatives hard - 21 with exception for marriage Moderate Religous conservatives - 18 Centrists/liberals - they will look at Europe and see that the world didn't ended and probably say that it is 16(.)

So, let me get this straight:

Hardline religious conservatives in Congress, many hailing from states like or constituencies resembling Alabama and Arkansas and Ohio (16) are going to set the age at 21, while the liberals from California (18) and New York (17) are going to set it at 16.

Full list here. The plurality is 16, though we all seem pretty comfortable enforcing CP laws built around 18, and you have most of the big important states (CA, NY, TX, VA, FL) higher than 16. There's actually not much of a pattern to Red/Blue: FL and CA are both 18, TX and NY are both 17, Massachusetts and Alabama are both 16. Either this issue is simply not one actually considered,

Fighting the hypo a little: if we were to see a movement form to actually pass such a law, it would undoubtedly need some passionate movement behind it, and the passion right now comes from the "SHE WAS JUST A 28 YEAR OLD BABY YOU SICK FUCK" age-gap end of things. We'd need a movement similar to Prohibition: an alliance of women and Southern Baptists. I could genuinely imagine a scenario where we get some kind of insane age-gap law that took the Romeo and Juliet law approach and tried to set the "true" age of consent at 25, with a R+J rule set at 5 years and an exception for marriage. Feminists call it a law against exploiting young women (sub rosa: against young women stealing husbands!), the Qanon caucus calls it an Epstein law, the rump-remnant of the Evangelicals is happy with any law that both serves to restrict fornication and inserts the government back into sexual morality, a bunch of IdPol types on both sides find ways to make it about protecting preferred races against the exploitation of disfavored races. Zoomer online discourse around age gaps is truly insane, older voters are broadly more conservative and will relish inserting themselves into young people's sex lives. Only 8% of couples have an age gap bigger than ten years.

That's how I could see it happening.

Closer to your hypo, if everyone for some reason was forced to vote on it tomorrow, I think we'd land on 18 with a 4 year R+J, and at least at first blush without time to propagandize we wouldn't see much partisan breakdown, the state list shows no pattern and if there were a strong partisan pattern it would show up in state legislatures. That seems to be the direction that more recently passed laws are going, I don't know the last time a state truly lowered the AoC.

We've definitely wind up with 18. My personal stance is that this is pretty stupid and 16 is fine but the incentives against arguing that publicly substantially outweigh any gain from just shrugging and saying, "well, there ya go I suppose".

Provided there's sufficient leeway for similarly aged young people to get together with their peers without the government getting involved, I don't really see what difference it makes on the margins between 15-19. I suppose there's some May-December, or April-August, marriages that get prevented; but that doesn't strike me as an overly tragic outcome.

Nobody will be willing to advocate for anything other than 18 with a shotgun wedding exception, most like.

Right now yeah, but as things are I can see some frustrations that might be able to set the stage for future agitation to finally stop the advancing postponement of adulthood. (By the time my sister felt "ready" to have kids she was pressing up against a geriatric pregnancy.) Right now the biggest rhetorical weapon against young adults is this idea that your brain isn't finished developing until 25.

Maybe more research discovers that this delayed development is of no real use. Maybe we recognize that most things we ask adults to take responsibility for do not require that your brain reach some state we can only even notice with brain scans. Maybe we suddenly remember that, oh, not long after 25 your brain starts un-developing and we don't gradually strip legal privileges of people as they age (unless it causes the failure of some qualification, e.g. driver's license, but age will not per se disqualify you!).

not long after 25 your brain starts un-developing

I think treating it as any kind of unary scalar variable is just wrong. Yes, young brains may be more agile, but that's not the only metric that matters. E.g. kids are awesome at learning new stuff, especially stuff like languages, but their brains are a disaster (from adult's perspective) in many other regards. I don't think there is also an objective metric for this possible - it is rooted very deep in the culture. You can't just treat an outcome of several layers of cultural trends as a free parameter that you could move around at will, this will get you a lot of angry people who would (somewhat deservedly) think you're messing with the basic foundations of their world view just out of pure satanic contrarianism.

Right now the biggest rhetorical weapon against young adults is this idea that your brain isn't finished developing until 25.

Uh, no it’s not. I’m sure it gets cited in the occasional thinkpiece, but how much does that translate into zoomers’ decisions? Have you ever seen an adult say, “sorry, I can’t, my brain isn’t developed enough”?

Today’s twentysomethings are getting out of college with alarming debt and questionable prospects. They’re looking at rampant inflation of credentials, let alone prices. Cars are expensive. Housing ie worse. Insurance is fucked. There is a sense that someone is benefiting and they know it can’t be them.

COVID-era remote school and work derailed their social lives. Social media, a poor surrogate at the best of times, metastasized into something actively discouraging. They are constantly reminded that the world is struggling, with the people in charge malicious and/or incapable. No matter what they believe, they are reassured that half the country hates them and will dismantle anything they like on principle.

Given a choice, more of them are choosing to hunker down and hope for better times.

but how much does that translate into zoomers’ decisions? Have you ever seen an adult say, “sorry, I can’t, my brain isn’t developed enough”?

Uh, yes it is. It's a very common sentiment. "My brain isn't developed how can I be expected to pick what I'll do for a living for the rest of my life?" "My brain isn't even finished developing why can I be drafted into combat?" (in your time this probably referenced legal drinking age in place of a reference to brain development). I've heard it used in stand-up comic bits. I don't have examples handy because I legitimately thought this wouldn't be denied, but you're just wrong here in my experience.

Uh, no it’s not. I’m sure it gets cited in the occasional thinkpiece, but how much does that translate into zoomers’ decisions? Have you ever seen an adult say, “sorry, I can’t, my brain isn’t developed enough”?

I have heard over-25s and under-25s alike all state this, and the problem with the over-25s who are also parents is that their kids hear that and take this seriously... and then, just as you'd expect, they proceed to shut the fuck down and never amount to anything (creating the "incompetent, risk-averse youths" problem).

And you know what? If I spent my entire fucking life having adults (and their power structures) scream the exact functional equivalent of "YOU STUPID NIGGER!"[1] at me I'd actually think the target's response of "everything out there is dangerous and Not For Children, so time to lie flat" is completely and eminently reasonable!

Besides, delaying [personality changes that are supposed to happen at] puberty has no consequences whatsoever, right? Just give them the [sociological] puberty blockers and they'll turn out well-adjusted, I'm sure.

[1] Too much melanin hormones in the brain just makes them inferior, end of story. We have a lot of scientific literature backing it up- it's not discrimination if they actually are inferior, after all.

Eighteen is the compromise between ‘c’mon now, teenagers obviously need the guidance of their elders’ and ‘they can’t stay kids forever’ we’ve already settled on as a society. Is it intrinsically better than 16? Only by already being established. For that reason I don’t see that changing.

Eighteen was not an organic compromise as you imply it was. It was borne of the top-down imposition of California's own culture, where the age is 18, through its worldwide reach in media. Arkansas's age of consent is 16 and could just as easily convince you that 16 was "the compromise" if we let them control what the world watched in its living rooms for several decades.

Yes, I just said that 16 as the generally agreed upon compromise is not clearly worse than 18. It simply happens that one is generally agreed upon and the other is not. But, well, something has to be generally agreed upon.

What I responded to:

Nobody will be willing to advocate for anything other than 18

I explained why I thought maybe that could change one day. To which you respond no, it won't change. To which I disagreed. I don't dispute here that "something has to be generally agreed upon."

Your formatting is broken. Add two spaces at the end of a line if you want a line break after that line.

(I don't have an informed opinion on the question.)

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