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Notes -
The States Unfair
The New Republic reports:
This is, to be blunt, not plausible. It's a pretty obviously not plausible. Pennsylvania is not a small state, nor an economically insecure one, nor a state that leans entirely blue in population or businesses. An individual county was able to find sufficient support for New Jersey's booth; Pennsylvania as a whole has much more resources available. There are, in fact, no small number of Pennsylvania businesses that would drool over the opportunity to represent the state in the most Trump-partisan environment possible, including individual businessmen that have outright donated tens of millions of dollars in Trump-partisan funding.
It appears that Shapiro only began asking businesses shortly before ("the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved", "we were asked by Governor Shapiro’s office in mid June") the start of the event, when it had become both much harder and more expensive to act. Not impossible, since I've personally deployed a small business convention booth literally across the planet with less notice, while driving from the ass-end of Pennsylvania to Washington DC is about seven hours, and no international customs. Still exactly what you'd do if you wanted the request to fail, without admitting that you wanted the program to fail. There are individual high school sports teams who could have gotten this done, including fundraising, had they been given the six months Ohio gave out. It's not even clear that the requests were sincere, rather than perfunctory.
And to spell things out: the Chamber of Commerce businesses did not say they did not want to participate, just that they couldn't manage it. Shapiro's explicit words, that the "None were interested," just weren't true.
There's some fun exploration about where this falls from a Bounded Distrust perspective. Shapiro's office put out a 700k USD price tag that's outright laughable if you've done any serious work like this. But it's also since just been falsified by reality. Pennsylvania's senators put out a call for businesses in the aftermath of the initial reporting, and got response and volunteers and an arranged booth immediately, despite the shorter timelines. So it turns out you don't need die-hard Trump supporters; a variety of mining businesses, crayon merchants, construction companies, and a nutrition supplement seller were quite happy to jump in.
But it got a nice slogan:
This is a trivial matter. The Fair seems to be a bit of a joke, the booth in question is a glorified convention stand, the weather means attendance may be lackluster, and few people will remember it in six months.
It's just that Shapiro, one of the moderates with the greatest reason to want to reach out across the aisle and show de-escalatory competence as an administrator, instead believed it more productive to punt on a glorified convention booth and then give an interview to TNR.
And in that interview, he said things that were false, so as to put the blame anywhere else, and people believed him.
The Shallow End of The Betting Pool
PBS reports:
There he goes, making up conspiracy theories about malicious actors responsible for his own run-of-the-mill incompetence.
... there's (weak) photographic evidence, isn't there.
To be fair, damage to the liner would not, on its own, result in the algae bloom. To be charitable to the point of fault, the liner could both be subject to sabotage and poorly applied or requiring early maintenance. The algae blooms themselves are near-certainly downstream of phosphate levels, and while (contrary to the cited expert) it doesn't take a ridiculous bulk of phosphate fertilizer or a long period to cause an algae bloom even in a pool this size, there are a wide variety of other plausible sources of phosphate. Decaying leaves or grass clippings, run-off from people trying to repair a different vandalism, mechanical failures in a filtration system, or use of water which already had phosphate in it are all possible.
It's just hard to tell what the actual situation is, when the New York Times began with Raise Doubts about Trump's claim at the headline, only to not actually find positive contradictions in the documents, and far down in the story to notice a paraphrased:
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
But that is, ultimately, just a pool liner.
It's not a question with millions of lives on the line.
The Question With Millions of Lives On The Line
The Lancet published:
A better statistician than I has already gone over the modeling problems, and they're significant:
It's a fun read if you like math, and better than I could write on the statistics side, so I'll not try. Instead, I'm going to hammer the model itself.
Some of the faults are simple and direct. A dose-response analysis is fundamentally taking a different perspective than any attempt to cut inefficient or wasteful spending. Some are more esoteric: many of the countries where USAID has the greatest significance are also those with the least state capacity to measure deaths. Instead, the public data sources are models that themselves use aid-dependent variables to estimate mortality rates. This circularity would just be a statistics problem on its own and explains some of the unusually convenient numbers that the LessWrong article notices, but there's a more critical problem: even assuming the aid-dependent modeling was correct, several of those programs were not stopped, only moved under the Department of State.
The Lancet paper does not actually consider a specific mechanism or group of mechanisms, but the underlying drivers of a significant majority are ART provisioning, and that runs into trouble when not all ART was under USAID to start with, and the parts that were had a waiver by February 2025, if not during the initial cuts and freezes.
Some disruption is plausible in early 2025. A complete cessation is not, and was not when the Lancet paper was published. The nightmare scenario that this paper treats as plausible isn't a genuine situation that could happen because of DOGE or the current USAID closure or extant or currently-proposed program cuts.
My problem here is not that this number is, ultimately, made up and dependent on counterfactuals, just as earlier predictions of 600k deaths were made up and counterfactual. It's not the Lancet's reputation: this is the paper that published Wakefield; it knows what it is.
There's a far more serious issue. These aid programs aren't getting less controversial, and they won't get more widely-supported if USAID floats back under the next administration to fund a stack of random scholarship programs and social events. There's no plausible scenario where putting ART programs under the Department of State results in this catastrophic cut from 2025 to 2030.
There is, however, reason to worry about it in the future.
The State Department itself estimates over 20 million people are getting ART through PEPFAR programs. While there's some fuzziness around the edges if you try to track down how they produce that number, since it's at least in part downstream of reporting by organizations that get money based on the number of treated patients, it's probably not off by 50%. Pulling ART from HIV-positive patients produces corpses within a half-dozen years, with very high reliability. And while it might be nice were the relevant governments able to fund their own people's treatment, a large portion of these countries aren't there and won't be there in twenty years.
((I'll caveat that it's not clear how much impact it would have on new infections; the data is pretty strong for it in individual cases, and very lackluster at population levels. While PEPFAR promotes high rates of testing and ART treatment as an HIV eradication tool, in practice even countries that have hit PEPFAR's 95-95-95 metrics officially have only seen modest reductions in new HIV cases that are hard to isolate from other potential causes. Studies have maxed out around 40% reduction. And, of course, ART as an 'HIV eradication' framework has conflict with 15- to 20-million-plus people who would keep having HIV for forty years even if new transmission went to zero.))
And there are a few other programs with other similar body counts and unsolvable problems. It's a little easier for a marginally-capable government to begin handling its own tuberculosis program than handle bulk orders of ART, but many of these countries are not marginally-capable.
The Lancet study is wrong because that ART rugpull isn't happening, yet. What happens if someone does propose it? What, if any, distinction would readers be able to take, when the Lancet gives a panicked paper worried about the next mass murder? Who's going to care?
Most media coverage focuses hard on the trolley problem: whether cutting funding is equivalent to murder. That's an interesting philosophical question, but it depends on a foundation that's falling out of the basement level: whether people would care even if it were.
Because there's a limit. After the third or fourth time you promise your political opponents are going to commit mass murder on scales previously reserved for the biggest genocides ever recorded, and then in the aftermath, have to revise down to unremarkable numbers, that reputation follows you. And it's going to keep following even if the claimed catastrophe's actual meat does show up. Given that several fudge factors that supported the ART program are starting to fray around the edges, with the HIV eradication framework becoming so clearly unachievable that, or the various financial arguments about it being cheaper to avoid infection running head-first into infections that won't go away, that's a concern that needs to be treated seriously, not rhetorically.
But it's more useful to twist the edges of the truth today, to show how one's political enemies are monsters.
The idea that Trump has done anything wrong ever, in his life, is a baseless, unproven conspiracy theory put out by bad actors with a reckless and wanton disregard for the truth.
This is what some people sound like.
I do sympathise with our own ymeskhout on Trump and his supporters - okay, I grant that certain claims of malfeasance might be false or overstated, but the instinct to defend him, the requirement to defend everything no matter how corrupt or absurd, is profoundly humiliating.
Just making fun of the reflexive, incessant, PBUH-style "without evidence" quoted in one of the linked articles. Like 10+ arrests and police reports in the first few days for attempted or successful vandalism.
FWIW, I think ymeskhout made quite a few good points in his crusade against MAGA election rhetoric, and think he provided an extremely valuable service about it. I still suspect there was quite a bit of fuckery to one degree or another, and would not be surprised if there was an eventual Johnson-style historical conclusion that at least one state was steelman stolen, but there was definitely a shitton of irresponsible claims and rhetoric being thrown around.
To @Bartender_Venator, I generally think @gattsuru is one of the best posters on this site.
Yes, ymeskhout was very valuable in keeping people honest, even if he didn't win every point he made (something to be valued on this forum). His, uh, changes of emotional valence and stability came later. Agreed entirely on gattsuru, he's one of the true motteposters to whom we are the comments section.
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I assume that Iconochasm is making some kind of esoteric point, because gattsuru is one of the last people here one could reasonably accuse of tribal blindness.
Fair enough. Just take me as making an unrelated comment, I guess.
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I have trouble taking the USAID crying seriously. If people really, truly cared about the pullback in aid they would do what they could to fill the gap. The Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis et al have a standard of living most of us can only dream of. Are they sacrificing their luxuries to save these people they are crying about? No. And they'll excuse it by saying a government org can do more blah blah. You know what? When I really care about something, I do what I can about it. I don't throw up my hands and say why bother because I can't do as much as some other way.
It leaves me thinking it's all a bunch of lies. Which is a shame. Because I think some of the programs were good, even if they don't hit my top concerns. So how stupid am I to think the programs were good if people living seriously luxurious lives can't even give up their caviar in order to help fill the gap?
Musk deliberately implemented the cuts in a way which made that almost impossible in the short term. None of the named individual victims identified by Kristof could have been saved by someone taking over funding - they all died because of the chaotic way in which USAID was shut down. If you remember Musk's bragging at the time, the point wasn't just to cut spending - it was to feed the agency into a woodchipper and create psychological distress in the staff. That had consequences, which were intended, and the people who did it are responsible for what they did. (Clearly the number of people who died specifically as a result of Musk's intentional cruelty is much lower than the big numbers being slung around, but Musk continues to insist that it is zero and threaten legal action against people who disagree). I will enjoy the schadenfreude if the screwworms get him. I will not enjoy the schadenfreude if (as is more likely) all they get is a bunch of normie Texas ranchers who voted for the Face-Eating Leopard Party.
The Clinton Foundation is sufficiently notorious that one might suspect bad faith. It wasn't their own personal money, but Bill Clinton spent most of his time since leaving office fundraising and organising charitable work, either through the Clinton Foundation or through his partnership with George HW Bush. The most visible programme the Clinton foundation ran was providing AIDS drugs to kids in Africa - so the Clintons were doing precisely the thing you blithely assume they were not doing.
The Obama's and Pelosi's considerable charitable donations (hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in both cases) are also a matter of public record that I was able to find with 30 seconds googling. Obama focussed on US domestic poverty and providing scholarships for poor kids. (Like most ex-Presidents, Obama moves far more dollars by fundraising than he can donate himself - but that is just being effective in your charitable work). Paul Pelosi focussed on the usual arts and elite universities bougie philanthropy bullshit.
Actual excess deaths appear to be something in the ballpark of zero. This is probably why Nicholas "Dog Rape" Kristoff used anecdotes.
Screwworm has been a growing problem, creeping closer for years, almost certainly linked to the Biden migrant wave. The US under Trump is putting more effort into combatting it, including building a second sterile-male production facility.
Given the inaccuracy of African demographic statistics, "something in the ballpark of zero" and "100,000 dead kids across the countries where USAID used to operate" are compatible. The numbers in the millions are not plausible given the lack of a visible macro-demographic effect.
Sure. But that same logic also applies to all positive claims that USAID was doing good.
Exactly. I'm sure that making such a large change probably technically killed >0 people, but I also feel that massive amounts of USAID funding had been commandeered over the years on absolutely massively exaggerated claims of efficacy and 'We cut programs that claimed to keep millions of people alive' =/= 'They were keeping millions of people alive and they instantaneously died'. An organism of that size is going to have a large amount of ineffective altruism (even if it's actually attempting to be Altruistic as opposed to a political slushfund) and the galaxy brain takes that every single dollar that USAID spend was equally effective in saving lives and there was no marginal benefit fall off is inherently silly.
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From The Lancet paper, "Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis":
US thought leadership and Overton window-setting for the win!
Saving US and European taxpayer money and a reduction in low human capital population counts? Don't threaten me with a good time.
Women most affected, especially those of reproductive age. I'm amused by how the finiteness of the female reproductive lifespan suddenly becomes self-evident and paramount when talking about Western taxpayers subsidizing (or not) the reproduction of low human capital populations.
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It's worth pointing out that there was originally a non-partisan body operating under the name "America 250" created in 2016 to oversee the celebration. The process for creating the commission was that the congressional leadership of both parties would each get to select an equal number of members, two from each branch of Congress and then eight private citizens. A bunch of non-voting members were added in 2020. Obama and Bush are both honorary co-chairs. Of the $150 million appropriated for America250 they received $25 million, much of the rest was then routed to Freedom250, an organization headed by Trump and Vance and consisting of members they appoint.
I think that's important context for why Shapiro found a plausible reason not to participate.
That's... not quite the congressional authorization:
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It was obvious by January of this year that committee had no plans to do much of anything at all.
That sounds like a totally unrealistic claim to me. Can you imagine this all-star lineup failing to deliver? They had important bipartisan Senators, Senators from the Bridge to Nowhere State and the Bakersfield-to-Fresno State, on board. They even had Kellyanne Conway to keep Trump happy. To me, this looks like a focused group practiced in relentless goal-driven executing, and they would have delivered us a wonderful celebration of patriotism and fireworks, maybe even multiple fireworks, up to a whole box of fireworks - look, these are busy people...
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I just don’t care about prepfar. AIDS in Africa ends if they quit having dry sex. The spread rate in heteros is too low to spread HIV in communities that just don’t do dry sex. The US responsibility is nothing more than handing out pamphlets saying don’t do dry sex and you will be safe. If a community of people can’t do modest behavioral modifications to eliminate a disease then it’s not my problem.
From a prevention side, there's also just not that strong support for PrEP for heterosexuals in Africa, regardless. There were two major trials of traditional PrEP for use in heterosexual contexts for PEPFAR countries, and they were both shut down early because adherence was so low it wasn't even ethical to continue it. Even the combination of extremely high claimed detection rates, heavy ART usage, theoretically very strong viral load reduction, handing out PrEP, and even goofy stuff like voluntary adult circumcision, haven't been able to get transmission rates down that low. The information of dry sex is less robust (and more gross), but if the existing infrastructure isn't getting serious drops in new infections by discouraging it, it's not going to do so in the future.
There's been some efforts toward an injectable and long-lasting PrEP formulation, but even if that does work better, it's not likely to have significant impact on the broader epidemic, and the very ease of application that makes it useful also means it doesn't need PEPFAR-like administration to deliver.
But that still leaves the problem of ART. Even if you dropped current transmission rates to zero, there's still going to be over fifteen million people with HIV; you can't unfuck that goat. You don't have to bite that ethical bullet, but it's a major part of the PEPFAR program, probably the most clearly effective in terms of QALY improvement, and it is an ethical bullet.
Adherence rates to ARVs once AIDS has hit a point that ARVs are imminently lifesaving are low enough to be one of the biggest complaints you'll hear from doctors in Africa. I know someone - a lovely and thoughtful woman - who's nearly died twice because she wanted to stop taking her meds, because taking them was admitting to having the disease. Africa is just a very weird place.
Honestly, noncompliance is one of the more consistent and understandable bits: both PrEP and ARVs have unpleasant side effects, disruptions to supply chains or mobility give a lot of excuses, and the stigma is pretty present even in countries where it'd be possible to take the medicines privately. People with chronic illnesses 'forgetting' their meds because they're doing fine now is really common in the West, even for diseases that are hilariously unpleasant. PrEP has the further problem where it's perceived as accusing your sexual partner of infection or infidelity in a space where that's a serious insult.
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FTFY.
Fair opinion.
But I am fine with like helping out Venezuela when they have an earthquake and they can’t help themselves.
But spending US money so Africans can do genital mutilation is much worse. HIV is a solved issue in Africa.
I'm not opposed to offering help under unusual circumstances. But that's a reflection of our virtues, and I want a hard cutoff (or at least intense pushback) on anyone who treats it like an entitlement.
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States should participate in the fair, because if they don't, a private company might do it for them and embarrass the rest of us. Like the morons that put up a confederate flag for NC. Really, the bar isn't very high.
As for the pool, it seems implausible that anyone could do that much damage with a knife. The liner is supposed to be industrial grade epoxy; Trump bragged that it was impervious to cutting. If a woman could do that much damage by dipping her arm in the pool, sounds like the installers didn't do their job.
I don't know those specific material, but I'd be surprised if the primer coat were intended as the main durability aspects, rather than acting as a bonding agent.
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