domain:betonit.substack.com
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1hr ago
The great thing about printing money here in America is that we are the USA USA USA baby! Everyone takes our dollar, they take it for oil, for oranges, for tungsten, for cars, for iphones. We print it up out of thin air and they give us real goods for it every day.
The higher the trade deficit the more they are getting ripped off by exchanging real goods for dollars. Even with all the printing we are still experiencing a strong dollar and less inflation compared to other countries that don't have the backing of the US economy and 11 carrier strike groups.
Look at any currency vs the US dollar over the last 4 years. The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. MMT is a brilliant scheme for extracting real material and goods from the rest of the world in exchange for protection and promises. It is crazy that we get away with it! USA USA USA!
Skibboleth
9hr ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1hr ago
This is wildly out of touch with the actual odds of something like this occurring if you leave you home state. This is fox news 80 year old grandpa levels of living in a fear bubble. I'm really not trying to be rude here. It is just a bit boggling to me, the world is a big beautiful place and just because people have a different opinion on some issues doesn't make it dangerous to visit other states or countries. Do some traveling, step out of your comfort zone and you'll find that your fears are unwarranted.
LateMechanic
7hr ago
This is rather MMTers poking some fun at other supposed macro experts who don't actually have a correct clear grasp on how money or government funding works. He kept tripping over his words because his intuition was leading him astray, so "government prints money and then lends it" kept coming out. The correct, clear, simple answer is that government prints money in the form of bonds every day, and swaps them with central bank reserves where appropriate (like swapping between $100 bills, $1 bills, and quarters where appropriate, perhaps when trying to ride the bus or go to the arcade). The only clash is that people have pre-existing non-sensical stricter definitions of the word "money", so MMT generally prefers to sidestep a language intuition issue and just refer more broadly to what matters, financial assets.
It's already been nearly a decade since mainstream economists stopped trying to say MMT is wrong, and switched to "we knew that already", so I guarantee you MMTers aren't saying something as obviously wrong as "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation". And it's MMT who has pushed better & better verbal explanations to laypeople of all those interlocking balance sheets in IGI's linked NYFed diagram.
Skibboleth
15hr ago
Catch-all pejorative for political opponents is actually the standard usage.
ControlsFreak
19hr ago
Because not all slippery slopes logically entail exactly whatever anyone can just throw out there as a possible conclusion? So, perhaps, you're throwing out "death of innovation" as the end of the slope, but that's actually akin to "dog marriage". And someone else might throw out a different possibility as the end of the slope, and that's akin to trans stuff. A reasonable conversation can be had about the connection between gay marriage and those two different possible end points, just like a reasonable conversation can be had here about this regulation and different possible end points. You would simply terminate the conversation immediately and conclude that it must be dog marriage/death of innovation. This seems like a pretty obvious non sequitur, a conversation killer, a mind killer, and the enemy of rational discussion.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22hr ago
I’m not being dishonest. I’m specifically not abusing the word “literal” or adding scare quotes to characterize policies I don’t like.
I believe Trump was measurably ineffective at his stated policy goals, and that his 2020 regulations don’t tip the balance. While he is obviously more likely to curb Title IX than a Democrat, that’s a low bar. I’ll stand by my statement: pundits who expect Trump to usher in “fresh prince” liberalism are going to be disappointed.
Do you have a current complaint about the current regulation, or are you just complaining retroactively about California's regulation?
EDIT: It doesn't sound like you have a current complaint about the current regulation, because you say:
There's no point in talking about the specific merits of the specific regulations
But I want to make sure I'm not strawmanning you. Thus, I'm just trying to confirm that the appropriate understanding of your argument is that everything was doomed (at least) four years ago, and that you have nothing more to add. I think it could have saved us lots of digital ink if you had just spoken plainly about this being your position in the beginning.
Lizzardspawn
16m ago
Liberalism and democracy are tools not goals.
I think you mistake what me and 2rafa are talking about is that a state have 2 modes - slow burn and fast. Democracy is by design made to be ineffective - especially the modern, especially the US one. And whenever you look at history - the big fast efficient strides are made usually under some form of authoritarian government. Democracy is quite good in maintaining a nash equilibrium, authoritarian government - into moving from one to another. Both have uses. A deep state problem can't be solved democratically - as is big all encompassing bureaucracy.
But right now - the authoritarian streak of the US is manifested trough courts which perverts the justice system.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Not once in there did I say anything about it becoming an over-regulated morass. You can change your culture enough to do the trivial fucking basics without becoming an over-regulated morass.
freemcflurry
5hr ago
Who is that in the video?
cjet79
7hr ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).
In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).
But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)
drmanhattan16
10hr ago
The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".
BahRamYou
11hr ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11hr ago
You're smuggling in the assumption that the reaction to paying out tax instead of having it withheld is the more "correct"/rational reaction. I could just as easily assert voting conservative for that reason is letting their heart and wallet override their mind.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.
Dean
13hr ago
I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.
Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15hr ago
I mean, I think the regime you describe for the ADA satisfies all of the 1-3 points you propose for basic things you agree on, though perhaps not in a manner you like.
There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
Of course. The ADA, and many similar pieces of legislation, contain explicit limits on what is to be covered and who must (or may not) provide accommodation under the Act.
There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
We do this with the ADA, and many similar laws, via a combination of the private market and our adversarial justice system. Businesses talk to consultants and experts to understand what they need to do to be in compliance. Sometimes people think they're wrong about whether they are and get sued. Then a jury of their peers is going to be responsible for figuring out whether they were in compliance and how much they harmed the plaintiff if they weren't.
This process may not come up with some obvious fixed-in-advance dollar amount but it seems a very common way of determining how much "we" should spend fixing a particular problem.
Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).
Of course. The Act describes who is covered and what accommodations those covered need to make. If anyone is alleged to be in violation theirs a public judicial process to determine if they are. Characterizing this as a "reverse lottery" is absurd. Lots of businesses (probably most) manage to go without being sued under the ADA or similar laws. Who wins and loses is not random either, unless you think the outcomes of jury trials are random. In which case there's this whole thing called "the criminal law" that should be much more concerning.
ControlsFreak
17hr ago
CMOS RAM
Fair enough. Hopefully the worst case is that this ends up not being covered, even though it should be.
5.4-2 (unique IDs)
I think I can agree that there may be tradeoffs here for some devices.
twenty sensors on a LIN line
I think these would almost certainly just be classified as "constrained devices", and they also give alternate mechanisms for valid trust relations, which I think will be what the automakers go for. They'll do the verification at a different step and say that the lack of physical or other access is what ensures that presence on the network is sufficient.
A presumption toward encrypting everything makes sense when it's free or nearly-free, but there are a lot of entire devices where it's just not that relevant. If your equipment does literally nothing but relay temperature and humidity values over ISM bands, you might want some amount of authentication to prevent spoofing, but it's really not that big a deal if someone can listen in. And there's a lot of IoT stuff that goes into that category.
There's some parts of the rules that motion around this -- 5.5-1's "Appropriateness of security controls and the use of best practice cryptography is dependent on many factors including the usage context" or the exceptions for ARP, DHCP, DNS, ICMP, and NTP in 5.5-5 -- but again that turns the requirement into aspirational text.
I think you're right that some portion of this is aspirational text, but I think it's along the lines of, "If you can just put some reason down on the table for why this should be considered aspirational text, then you're probably fine," and the only people who are at risk are the people who are doing the clearly and obviously boneheaded stuff. Like, I don't think it's going to be hard for the maker of a device that does nothing but relay temperature and humidity values over ISM bands to just say, "It's a constrained device; can't do any of that fancy stuff; pretty much no way in anyway," and we can all mostly go home happy. If we start having major corporate networks brought down by botnets of temperature monitors (uh, how?), then perhaps folks will have to figure out how to make it more than aspirational text.
In any event, thanks a bunch for really thinking through edge cases for a wide variety of really specialized and, for lack of a better term, really constrained devices.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
You have opened with sneers, the relevant fragments were already quoted to you. I never said you should put forward a complete framework. Much like you are demanding of others and are refusing to give yourself, I said you should start with anything anyone can bite into. You have baited people into a low-quality pissing contest, and are acting upset that they took the bait.
I never once misrepresented my opponents' views. They still explicitly claim that I represented them appropriately.
Again: where is the part where they say they death of innovation is instantaneous and absolute? If you can't show that part, you have misrepresented their view precisely to the amount you are claiming they have misrepresented yours.
ControlsFreak
20hr ago
We're having a nice conversation here about the regulation in question. That is a good way of having a discussion about having non-zero regulation, but hopefully not too much of it. One can argue that some of the specifics are, in fact, too much of it, but that's what that conversation looks like... not the mess the other guys are doing.
One could even go after a "framework for analyzing", even in slippery slope situations. Here's a good example of how to construct such a framework, and I think rich conversations could be had. In fact, it could even be beneficial to have a top-level comment that branches off from Volokh's work to have a nice robust discussion on how to construct an appropriate framework.
But they're still refusing to have any sort of framework, discuss any sort of specifics, nothing. Just that they have declared that the slope is slippery, and nothing more need (or can) be said. That is it. That once we have passed epsilon, we are on the slope, one cannot discuss frameworks anymore, and doom is upon us. This is not a strawman. This is a repeatedly stated position, stated openly, and resistant to any attempt to bring the discussion back to the type of thing that you would like.
jkf
23hr ago
Whatever man -- that's the reason, and she's not wrong. "Turn up the heat" is an interesting approach to dealing with evaporative cooling -- if there were a (metaphorical) retort somewhere capturing all of the quality people who've had enough around here, it's getting to the point where that would be a better place to hang out.
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
Drone regulation went from zero to some. We could debate the merits of specifics there, as well, but does anyone seriously hold that, after having gone from zero to some drone regulation, all innovation in drones is crushed to zero, that everything is doomed and that nothing can be saved?
In any event, drones have different concerns than manned aircraft. I wholly expect that a detailed discussion about the similarities/differences would be rich and fruitful, but what is not rich and fruitful is observing that drone regulation has gone from zero to some and concluding that it must be impossible that the FAA is opening up to alternative navigation and control systems for manned aircraft, especially since the conclusion is factually false.
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
Understood and agreed. We'd then have to shift to a discussion about the theory of slippery slopes and regulation dynamics. I don't think @The_Nybbler is open to that discussion yet. He thinks that "there's no point" in discussing anything like that; once we've crossed epsilon, all is doomed, and nothing can be saved. If he'd like to walk back that claim and actually have a detailed and reasonable discussion about what happens after we cross epsilon, I am here and waiting, but he has to agree to those terms rather than constantly immediately shifting back to claiming that once you cross epsilon, all is doomed and nothing can be saved.
I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act
It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.
If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.
Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.
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