domain:slatestarcodex.com
Throwaway05
4m ago
That significant minority is definitely a Thing in my book, though, and what makes them stick out like sore thumbs to me is the DRAMA.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Good reminder for me that the certain magnitudes and types of pathology are disproportionately noticeable and dangerous and at the same time they are not representative of the "true" range and median of pathology.
Those people have the temperament and social support to be loud, proud and disruptive.
RE: your wife - I can't speak to the therapist end of things but I have noticed that physicians of all specialties are slowly starting to ask more questions and explore more nuance, but the pipleline (med school) is still quite rigid.
I expect us to loosen up in 5-10 years and for adjacent fields to do the same.
Until then....hang in there ugh.
hydroacetylene
5m ago
Yes, it caused the crisis of the third century. Imperial China has also bankrupted itself.
hydroacetylene
7m ago
That has not been my experience with elderly people. Many are confused by the conditions on the ground, sincerely don’t know how expensive their benefits are(after all, they’re not paying for it), and think the stock market benefits everyone.
Others feel bad for young people due to the cost of housing these days, and although they won’t sell their paid off houses that’s because they need to live somewhere. I’ve said before that among my extended family in the ArkLaTex region old people with money are expected to spend it helping out younger relatives get started, either by co-signing loans or direct gifts(or occasionally through coresidence). But more generally, I don’t get the hate over boomer consumption because it is, generally, much lower than the consumption of working people who criticize them on the basis that their resources should be reallocated. Cruises are, on the scale of vacations, pretty cheap. Retirees aren’t DoorDashing much. And boomer housing wealth isn’t actually something they can do much about.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
8m ago
I saw an Nvidia presentation where Ai can be used to simulate an assembly line or an entire factory or warehouse, including even modeling the physics of the entire process of moving and assembling goods. Surely, there will some productivity gains from all of this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
12m ago
The Republicans haven't been the party of "fiscal responsibility" any more than the Democrats have been the party of the working class in living memory.
I know. I said as much.
Are you just making a somewhat sardonic argument for accelerationism ("we should just loot the treasury since that's what everyone does when they're in power?")
The way you are framing the issue here is illuminating of my point, I think. I did not use the word "looting". Do you personally recognize entitlement spending as "looting" in other contexts? Does the Democratic party generally? I appreciate that many Republicans have considered entitlement spending as "looting", but why should the party as a whole do so now? Why not argue that the Democrats were right, that government spending is good, and make our own case for the best way to do it? Nor would this be pure cynical posturing. The SLS is a national disgrace in terms of achieving the goals the money was earmarked for. In terms of maintaining some sort of "productive" economic activity in a number of geographically-dispersed communities around the country, maybe it's actually the best of a bad set of options? And if not, under what principles, and who are these principles supposed to be championed by? To the extent that "Entitlement spending is looting" is a case that needs to be made, why not openly invite others to make it by legibly abandoning the position oneself? My party actually spearheaded the GWOT, and a lot of the current tumult is us making a serious effort to strip power from those members of our faction responsible. It is not guaranteed that this will actually resolve the problem, but it's something, isn't it?
In any case, whichever angle one chooses to approach the problem from, it seems unlikely to me that the old shibboleths are productive here.
Every other "budget-cutting measure" (including and especially DOGE) is just theatrics.
From my perspective, DOGE's value comes from it attacking Progressive patronage networks that turn federal tax dollars into progressive political influence, with secondary purposes of normalizing the idea of disruption of disruptive reorganization of sclerotic federal bureaucracy. It actually balancing the budget appears to be a novel political tactic called "lying". It will be interesting to see how this new technique alters our political landscape now that its usefulness has been demonstrated.
The actual solution to the debt is what we've discussed many times: entitlements and defense spending, both of which are regarded as more or less untouchable.
This could actually be a very good time to cut defense spending drastically, provided we can be pretty sure we won't have to fight a war in, say, the next decade. An unknown but likely very large percentage of our current equipment is pretty clearly now obsolete, and the new paradigm has not solidified. Until it does solidify, it seems to me very likely that most military spending will be pure waste. Funding for Ukraine is, perversely, probably the exception, as it can at least be argued that it helps establish the new paradigm. One of the major downsides is that it appears to increase our risk of an actual war.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that, in my view, Defense spending should absolutely be as touchable as entitlement spending, maybe even more so.
Here we hear arguments for AGI saving us, or asteroid mining opening up a new frontier, or Modern Monetary Theory being real, all just variations on "Wish for a miracle." Or are we debating how much ruin is actually left in the nation and whether we or our children will outlive it?
Deus Ex Machina or Ruin do appear to be the likely outcomes, with one significantly likelier than the other. But more generally, the question is whether the tactics we've historically relied upon offer any real traction on these probabilities. Republicans have not, in fact, proved themselves capable of "fiscal responsibility" in any meaningful sense, and it seems at least arguable to me that pretending otherwise makes actual fiscal responsibility harder, not easier.
But you do make a compelling case that rather than hoping for actual economic reform even if it does mean I personally will see my retirement amount to less than it should have been, I should be selfish and just try to grab what I can and hope I'm dead before the shit really hits the fan. Sucks for the kids, though.
"We", surely. Looting individually is far less efficient; many hands make light work. But more generally, if this is the situation, what benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
fmac
12m ago
but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.
Like yes, but actually no. Just because the government could raise the age of social security doesn't mean they will. In fact, I am deeply and profoundly confident they never will, unless the country is in active meltdown.
I cannot imagine a better way to get BTFO in a western election.
Although France did it, and it's not repealed yet, so maybe it's possible.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
12m ago
Bitcoin continues to be useless for organized crime due to the transparency and permanence of the blockchain . There is no way to cash out even if the transactions are anonymous and not tied to a person.
hydroacetylene
20m ago
I mean, pro-Americanism in the third world often has a different aesthetic- cowboy hats, pickup trucks, country music…
Approximately everyone, after all, likes dancing, beer, BBQ, sports, etc. But it’s often difficult to see the appeal of socially liberal norms when you don’t already want them.
hydroacetylene
23m ago
But LGBT might be unpopular enough to push them away from the US, especially in Africa but potentially also in Latin America, where the default position is to be part of the U.S. sphere and so changes need to be weighed against the generally favorable baseline.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
28m ago
Good point. I was thinking in practical terms (where he has nothing to lose), but forgot how ego-driven the man is.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
28m ago
Buffett ALWAYS talks his book, he wants to sell annuities to people making 200k to 1m a year and knows they could set his tax rate at 200% and he still wouldn't pay taxes (because he almost never does anything that is taxable).
zoink
29m ago
That got me thinking. Even if a AI robot couldn't be out there swinging a hammer with me a camera that can take in the situation and tell me what to do, pre order the parts,, then walk me through through the work would be really hand in construction, and working on vehicles. Probably cut my 5 trips to Home Depot to replace the water heater to 2. Or that time I wired in heater take into the wrong run of Romex and now it only turns on when the downstairs kitchen light is turned off...
hydroacetylene
37m ago
The reality is that to balance the budget you have to answer- who do you want to kill? Grandma or our soldiers? And nobody willing to answer that question will ever get elected.
The political realities mean the debt will be paid for by 1) inflation and 2) lying about the debt(your social security checks will not go as far as promised, sorry). The government will bail out load bearing sectors of the economy, maybe at third remove, but the average person will see a decline in purchasing power. Maybe to Western European levels, maybe not. It’ll be a prolonged economic crisis and that will cause political instability but there’s a lot of ruin in a country.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
41m ago
A superpower going bankrupt is very much précédented(Russia in the nineties).
We're talking global reserve currency here. Did Rome ever go bankrupt? That's the closest analogy I could think of.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
A superpower going bankrupt is very much précédented(Russia in the nineties).
I’d also dispute that Trump going full thug and becoming a dictator would be able to meaningfully institute fiscal sanity.
FeepingCreature
45m ago
Thus all progress depends on the incompetent politician. ... Hang on.
Terracotta
57m ago
That's such a vivid account of the overall thought process; thanks for posting! If St. Augustine's depiction is accurate, it sounds as though there's a strong element of visceral carnivore/ hunting drive in there, which I guess checks out. It certainly makes sense for a partly meat-eating species to have a mode where it enjoys the sensory experience of catching and ripping apart a living animal while it screams. "Eew fresh meat, its pain gives me the squick" isn't exactly a survival-friendly instinct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
GA or NC might start to be in play
They already are - Biden carried GA in 2020, and Obama carried NC in 2008. GA is about one point redder than perennial tipping-point state PA and NC is 2-3 points redder.
And they aren't going to get less in play - the extra EV each GA and NC are gaining is due to Democrats moving there.
On the bigger point, losing by 1.5% (popular vote) or 1.7% (tipping point state) would only suggest a defunct party if it happened under unusually favourable circumstances (like Neil Kinnock not quite beating the Tories in 1992 despite a recession and the Poll Tax debacle). That the Democrats came that close despite running a zombie and doing a last-minute switcheroonie for the ultimate Affirmative Action candidate suggests a party that can win if it avoids unforced errors.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1hr ago
I think we see this along broadly similar lines, and I would add that the reason I spot more often in men is simply because most of my knowledge comes from them. The only FTM gender dysphoria case I know of is firmly in the first category according to her therapist, and I trust that judgment. More broadly, there's a decent amount of teens that identify as trans and the overall "vibe" that I get from the therapeutic standpoint is that these teens are largely trying out gender (and sexual) identities that are subject to change, as teenagers do in general with their identity.
To dig into MTF a little more specifically, firstly I'm not seeing anything in your description of the MTFs that you know that shouts BPD to me either, and my expectation is that MTF plus BPD is no more than a significant minority. That significant minority is definitely a Thing in my book, though, and what makes them stick out like sore thumbs to me is the DRAMA. Mostly, this seems to present as the individual almost always reporting that relationship failures and poor interpersonal dynamics are because people can't accept the MTF identity of the individual. Said individual never questions the role of their own behavior and treatment of others. There's a particular incident that sticks out in my mind here where a MTF teenaged client's MTF parent hijacked the kid's session and spent it all ranting about their own struggles loudly enough that I could hear it from a room away. The self-centeredness, lack of empathy, and splitting seemed to me to be dripping from just about every sentence. The session was supposed to be about how to help your struggling kid, for crying out loud! Occasionally, the reason for the relationship failures, poor interpersonal dynamics, etc., is seen by the MTF individual as more generally due to envy, jealousy, and other negative emotions that others have, as in, "I'm the hottest of the hot girls and they're just jealous and out to get me!" Either way, it's classic cluster B and to me matches BPD behavior in particular.
If you've got more thoughts, I'm more than happy to continue the conversation too. I think I've mentioned before that my wife is a therapist and some of this is based upon her experience. She is an idealist and is all about the needs of her clients, but even she privately confides in me that she worries about the social contagion aspect herself and cannot speak with this even with her cohort of fellow therapists.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
Stolen bitcoins? I have no doubt that soon Home Depot Presents: The Police® will be hauling away the perpetrators in Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents handcuffs. Assuming someone can pay them to investigate, this isn’t a communist country after all.
TIRM
1hr ago
I saw a documentary about law enforcement dealing with organized crime. There was some mobster that other mobsters tried to kill by luring him to a meeting and shooting him repeatedly in the back of the head with a 22. The bullets failed to get through his skull and tore up his scalp. He stood up, took the gun out of his would-be-murderer's hand and ran off.
I mean, firstly, 'significant resources' is load-bearing here in a way that's difficult to falsify.
For Musk:
- Donating significant sums of money to anti-MAGA organizations or political campaigns
- Orchestrating a serious political campaign aimed at attacking MAGA politicians.
- Actually withdrawing SpaceX support from the Federal Government.
- Tilting the X/Twitter algorithm against MAGA.
- Successfully impeding passage of the "Big Beautiful Bill" through grassroots action.
For Trump:
- Deploy the federal executive agencies to go after Musk's businesses.
These all seem pretty falsifiable, and I'm sure we could come up with other metrics. In short, I'm waiting to see what actually happens beyond mean tweets, which seems to me to be a solid general rule. I note that this spat is resulting in Musk departing Washington... right about the time that it was announced that he would some time ago, and Congressional Democrats now publicly calling for the release of the Epstein files, which is something that I and most of Trump's base is in fact all for and Trump ran on.
What does it matter to you whether Trump cancels Elon's contracts or Elon doesn't show up for republicans next election?
My hope is that these men will actually be able to advance my tribe's interests in concrete ways. We're short on elite backing, so we've got to take what we can get, and if even what we get can't get their shit together, that bodes ill for us long-term.
Your coalition is the same, the people who vote for guns and the people who vote for abortion and the people who vote for whatever else will turn out in 2028.
I mean, it's pretty obviously not. The entire neocon wing and much of the corporate wing has defected to the democrats, and we've picked up a whole bunch of former centrist democrat and working-class types. And I think this is a very good thing; realignment and reshuffling of the power blocks gives potential for a break in the deadlock and stagnation, potential for some measure of actual positive change. You mention guns and abortion; the guns we're actually seeing a serious push on, and the abortion we aren't; Roe has been removed, but there's no actual drive for federal abortion restrictions, and I think that's quite likely a significant change from the past. From an overall factional perspective, at least, this seems like a good thing.
And the thing is, The Democrats could do the same, and maybe will after this latest loss. What we've been doing clearly isn't working, so stop pushing on a brick wall and find some way to actually deliver positive change in peoples' lives. If the parties can't do that, policy starvation proceeds and we're all in trouble.
Again, why? Obviously your leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional - how can you read what Elon and Trump are tweeting at each other and conclude anything else? Would you ever behave that way, let alone behave that way if you were representing a nation? They're just dysfunctional in ways that you or your 'faction' approves of.
If the angry twitter exchange is the limit of it, then it is undignified, not dysfunctional, and dignity was a value most of us were priced out of long ago. We can survive and potentially even thrive without dignified leaders. If the beef actually compromises the mission, then that's a very bad sign for the rest of this term. Again, my hope is that we get actual progress out of this mess. If they can't do that, then everything gets worse, the odds of a win for the current D establishment in 2028 go up pretty significantly, and that's not an optimistic timeline from where I'm sitting.
You should probably update on at least the stability of Elon.
Sad but likely true; I'm still stanning for him at the moment as he's still one of the very, very few examples of someone who's actually made things better in a material way. We need much more of that, not less.
Was this meant to link to a pop song? If so, the reference went over my head.
I've always been a fan of music videos, and my eldest likes to sit on my lap with my headphones on and listen to them. SIAMES has a good one she was listening to, and that vid popped up in the youtube recommendations this morning. Watch it if you have the time, and tell me what you see as the sociopolitical vibe the vid communicates.
You mentioned veiled threats. From my perspective, they are absolutely endemic, unavoidable, permeating every facet of our culture. I am served them organically several times a week, and so I am not surprised when I read about majorities of progressives approving of outright political murder. The last time we went round on this, you asked me where the violence was, the day before Luigi murdered a CEO. The result was broad social support for his actions from the left, up to the media posting stories about how attractive he is and how many supporters he has and doesn't he sorta have a point here, let's have a discussion about this.
I do not think we're going to see thinly-veiled minecraft references from the MAGA grassroots toward Musk. But if you care about thinly-veiled Minecraft references as a general class, there are a lot of them, and a notable amount of actual minecrafting, happening right now as we speak. The violence is getting worse. Public figures are endorsing and encouraging it. Common knowledge continues to accrue, on both sides.
where's the guy who was trying to address the address the hate in his heart with his pastor, or something like that?
If you're genuinely curious, see the discussion about distrust of emotion here. I am instructed to love my enemies. That does not stop them from being my enemies. Factions are a fact, differences in values are a fact. The question is what to do about it, and renouncing hate means turning away from many of the obvious and easy answers.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
Also the physical jobs have been getting automated since the invention of the domesticated ox, the wheel, the lever, the steam engine and the assembly line. So what you are left with is the hardened core of physical jobs that are the hardest and least efficient to automate.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
Buffett made that statement in support of tax increases that would have made his secretary pay even more.
Why? Going from paper to digital was a much bigger step, and it created almost no productivity gains.
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