Open Thread 120.75

Posted on February 6, 2019 by a reader

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1,018 Responses to Open Thread 120.75

  1. Nancy Lebovitz says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:03 am

    It seems as though most people worldwide have organ meats in their cuisines, but even though Americans are mostly descended from organ meat eating cultures, Americans eat very little organ meat and the same applies to blood sausage. Any theories about why?

    • Elementaldex says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:13 am

      Accidentally reported you. Sorry.

      No theory on why the low levels of organ meat consumption in the USA exists, but I would observe that, at least in my circles, organ meat seems to be a growing fad. So maybe we are recovering from a temporary deviation from the norm of happily devouring livers.

    • sandoratthezoo says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:30 am

      As a top-of-my-head theory, Americans signal respectability via “having money” more than other cultures do, organ meats are cheap cuts of meat, and so when society as a whole got to the point where almost everyone could afford muscle meat instead of organ meat, everyone signaled their status by abandoning organ meat, and now we’ve just lost the taste for it.

      Note that high-status organ meat is still on-the-table. People eat foie gras, just not liver.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 6, 2019 at 11:11 am

        Sweetbreads, too. But at higher end restaurants, not in home cooking.

        • sandoratthezoo says:
          February 6, 2019 at 12:58 pm

          Tangentially: why are they called sweetbread? Being, well, neither sweet nor bread.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            February 6, 2019 at 7:47 pm

            The word “sweetbread” is first attested in the 16th century, but the etymology of the name is unclear.[6] “Sweet” is perhaps used since the thymus is sweet and rich-tasting, as opposed to savory-tasting muscle flesh.[7] “Bread” may come from brede, “roasted meat”[8] or from the Old English brǣd (“flesh” or “meat”).

            Wikipedia

          • littskad says:
            February 6, 2019 at 7:54 pm

            The Middle English word brede actually meant “roast meat”. It comes ultimately from an Indo-European root bhreu-, having to do with cooking (compare brew, broth, broil, braise, bratwurst, coming from the same root via different paths). Brede eventually came to mean a piece of anything cooked, and eventually, specifically modern bread. The Old English word for bread itself became the modern word loaf.

            As for the sweet, its original meanings more heavily emphasized ideas like “pleasant” or “pleasureful” rather than specifically “sugary”.

    • SamChevre says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:40 am

      I wonder if it has to do with the consolidation of slaughterhouses while refrigeration was still fairly new. Organ meats spoil easily, and so they are most commonly eaten very shortly after butchering. With the concentration of slaughterhouses in Chicago, organ meats which are quicker to spoil, and so harder to ship, weren’t easily available.

      This explanation would be compatible with the fact the chicken organs are still commonly eaten; chicken were butchered locally until the 1960’s.

    • broblawsky says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:01 am

      I suspect the Great Depression had a role in this – liver and other organ meats were a mainstay for many Americans during the Depression, and afterwards, people would’ve naturally avoided anything that reminded them of the lean times.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:09 am

      Squeamishness might be a factor, at least some of the time, though then the squeamishness would have to be explained.

    • J Mann says:
      February 6, 2019 at 12:51 pm

      I always assumed it was because:

      (1) Americans are relatively rich,

      (2) factory farming makes meat relatively cheap,

      (3) offal is harder to cook, and

      (4) we feed it to other animals, then eat the parts of those animals that we like best.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:18 pm

        This would take more information than I’ve got about the status and price of organ meat in other cultures.

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:47 pm

      Land is much cheaper in the US and Canada than most parts of the world, isn’t it? Presumably that makes raising animals cheaper. Americans and Canadians also seem relatively prone to abandoning traditional ways, or to shift them to be more modern or upscale or whatever – the traditional food might be made with the same spices, but it’s going to use a better cut of meat. The one use of organ meats in North America I can think of that’s relatively common is liver and onions – usually found in Jewish deli type places; maybe there’s more holding on to older cultural things there?

    • onyomi says:
      February 6, 2019 at 5:28 pm

      Was reading some premodern Chinese recipes lately and surprised at how much use blood is put to. Also funny from the perspective of a modern cookbook reader is that the first step in a recipe for braised dog will be “club a dog.”

      Blood I guess is just something people who slaughter their own meat have an excess of lying around, and so might as well put it to some use. When you don’t see that part, you’re less enthusiastic about finding a use for it.

      Re. organs, I imagine it was something people associated with necessity in the past, so once they could afford to they started eating just the “good” parts of the animals, like Japanese after WWII saw eating white rice as just eating the “good” parts of the rice.

      Now we later find out that maybe eating just the “good” parts, in addition to shutting down some culinary possibilities, may not be ideal, health-wise. Plus it’s rare enough practice that it can be fashionable again without seeming like a poor person thing to do.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 6, 2019 at 7:51 pm

        Was reading some premodern Chinese recipes lately and surprised at how much use blood is put to.

        Shows up in medieval European recipes as well.

        There are also places where yeast (berme) is used with no time for rising. My suspicion is that it’s the residue from beer making, used as a nutrient rather than a fermenting agent.

        • onyomi says:
          February 7, 2019 at 2:20 am

          Yeast extract (which I think is basically brewer’s yeast?) is frequently added to many foods nowadays, basically as a more healthy-sounding equivalent of msg–that is, something to give a savory “umami” flavor that comes from glutamate found naturally in foods like seaweed and Parmesan cheese. I even recall my grandmother putting brewer’s yeast powder on popcorn, basically in lieu of cheese or some additional savory seasoning beyond butter and salt.

          MSG is weird because now so ubiquitous in Asian cooking yet a relatively new invention (first created as a food additive in Japan, 1908, apparently). But it also makes a certain amount of sense given the prominent role seaweed broth plays in Japanese cooking.

          I wonder if yeast is serving a similar seasoning function in the recipes you’ve seen?

          • Lambert says:
            February 7, 2019 at 9:36 am

            Yeast extract is yeast, produced as a byproduct of brewing, that have been broken down by osmotic pressure.
            And yes, lots of glutamic acid.

    • The Nybbler says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:57 am

      Liver (in particular liverwurst) used to be something kids were famed for hating, so it must have been common at some point.

  2. Nancy Lebovitz says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:08 am

    How accurately does pi need to be calculated for any physically plausible project? Any theoretically possible physical project? In other words, I’m talking about building things or possible astronomical distances, but not cryptography or pure math.

    • dick says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:56 am

      There’s an answer from someone at NASA (spoiler: 15) and a lot of interesting analysis and discussion about that here.

    • A1987dM says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:29 pm

      I can’t imagine any situation in which a standard IEEE 754 double-precision floating-point number (corresponding to around 16 decimal digits) wouldn’t suffice (unless you were using a ridiculously numerically unstable algorithm, in which case what you should do is switch to a better algorithm, not compute pi with more precision). (I can’t recall ever using long double myself.) Heck, even double is probably overkill most of the time, but in modern general-purpose computers float isn’t usually any cheaper than that anyway.

    • Eric Rall says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:06 pm

      Pi = 3 is a decent approximation for most everyday applications: it’s only off by a little less than 5%.

      For more precise earthbound applications, the biggest round thing on the Earth is the Earth itself, which is off by about 1/300 from being a perfect sphere. pi / 300 is a little more than .01, so 3.14 +/- .01 should be the point at which things like surveying and navigation see more error from the Earth’s shape than from your estimate of pi.

      Then there’s precision design of large objects (buildings, rockets, planes, etc). I’ll leave discussion of those areas to people who know more about the practice of mechanical and structural engineering than I do.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:16 pm

      In chapter nine of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres mentions that he memorized pi to 3.141592 because “accuracy to one part in a million was enough for most practical purposes” (he contrasts this to Hermione, who memorized the first one hundred digits of pi because “that was how many digits had been printed in the back of her math textbook”). I don’t know how Eliezer came up with that cutoff point, but you could ask him on Twitter or make a thread on r/HPMOR.

      • metacelsus says:
        February 7, 2019 at 12:18 am

        Wait, shouldn’t that be rounded to 3.141593? The next digit after 2 is 6.

      • A1987dM says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:03 am

        I memorized it to 3.14159265358979 because “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics”

      • The Nybbler says:
        February 7, 2019 at 11:55 am

        I memorized 3.1415926535, I think because one of my calculators displayed that. The joke is that it’s wrong.

    • johan_larson says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:17 pm

      The earth has a circumference of about 40,000 kilometers. That’s 4 decimal places, in kilometers. Measure it in meters, it’s 7. Measure it in millimeters, 10, microns, 13, manometers 16. So if you need to precisely locate individual circuits on a silicon chip relative to the entire world, you need 16 decimal places of measurement in each dimension you are measuring.

    • CatCube says:
      February 6, 2019 at 8:19 pm

      I don’t know that there’s any theoretical justification, but I just glanced through the section properties tables in a common reference work for structural engineering (AISC’s Steel Manual), and they consistently use 6 decimal places (not significant figures) when giving numerical equivalents for theoretical values. For example, the area of a circle is given in the table as: A=πd²/4=πR²=.785398d²=3.141593R², or the second moment of area of an annulus is I=π(d⁴-d₁⁴)/64=.049087(d⁴-d₁⁴). This was true in both the current 14th Edition (from 2016) and the 8th Edition (from 1980).

      This is probably a huge amount of overprecision in practical terms, since very little of what we do would be measured in the field to more than three or four significant figures–we generally round dimensions to the nearest ⅛”, and many standard construction tolerances will be closer to whole inches than fractions of an inch.

  3. Nabil ad Dajjal says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:24 am

    Any other weeaboos interested in seeing how the Code Geass R3 movie turns out?

    Code Geass is one of my favorite animes of all time. The extreme camp and hammy performances, especially in the English dub, contrast beautifully with the more philosophical and intellectual elements of the show. The second season, R2, was a bit demented for most of its run but the ending reeled it back in and is one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in anime.

    That said, the spin-off material and recent movies haven’t been very encouraging. I couldn’t finish Akito, because while it wasn’t horrible I couldn’t care about the new characters at all and the retcons were very distracting. It also made the obnoxious choice to break with the previously nuanced take of the show, where the Japanese were shown to be highly flawed, in favor of eye-rolling jingoism.

    The repackaging of the show into movies was also handled poorly. Condensing fifty episodes down into two movies means that some elements will need to be condensed or removed, but the choice of what to keep seemed driven more by budget concerns than artistic ones. For example, Suzaku’s romance with Princess Euphemia is absolutely essential to his character motivation throughout the show’s run but nearly all of their interactions were cut while several long and now virtually context-free fights between giant robots were left intact. My suspicion is that condensing the romance would have required animating new scenes while the shots of knightmares punching each other could be lifted out of the show unchanged. The jingoism of Akito also seemed to make an unwelcome return, with several lines seemingly changed solely to make the Japanese look better.

    This has been pretty negative but I’m still ultimately interested in seeing R3. It has to be new material, so the problems with the movies should be less pronounced. Almost all of the characters are the same as in the show, so it shouldn’t have the same issue of boring unlikeable characters that Akito did. There’s a lot of potential to screw up the ending of R2 but I’m willing to give it a chance to handle it respectfully.

    • lvlln says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:57 am

      Wow, I didn’t know they were still making new Code Geass stuff. I’m actually pretty surprised by the ability of that series to stick around because I don’t think there’s some ongoing series that it’s based on that’s keeping up the fandom. I’d just thought that it was some some timeless appeal to Pizza Butt that made fanart of her keep showing up continually.

      I watched S1 of Code Geass way back when it was 1st airing, and there was that several-months delay between the 3rd-to-last-episode and the penultimate + final episodes which were released with each other. I remember hotly anticipating that grand finale, but for some reason, I felt no motivation to continue with R2. S1 was really really good in that campy way you described, and I didn’t even watch the dub! But I thought the way S1 ended, on that most cliche of cliffhangers, was just too perfect an ending of the series that I felt that watching whatever came after would, if anything, retroactively reduce my enjoyment of S1.

      I’ve been tempted to check out R2 since I haven’t heard any complaints about it being particularly worse than S1, but as time goes on, the more I forget the contents of S1 and the less I care about the story and characters, especially since I’ve been largely spoiled of some significant plot points (hard to be a big anime fan in late 00s – early 10s while avoiding those spoilers). But maybe I’ll try skipping right on over to R3 if it receives good reviews, since that’s supposed to be a movie and would take significantly less time investment than R2.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:50 pm

        I’m a bit torn, because on the one hand the ending of the first season is definitely a good stopping point and avoids the worst parts of R2. But the ending of R2 is such an excellent ending to the series as a whole that season one feels incomplete without it.

        But yeah, if you lost interest then there’s no reason to force yourself to binge-watch it now.

        Wow, I didn’t know they were still making new Code Geass stuff. I’m actually pretty surprised by the ability of that series to stick around because I don’t think there’s some ongoing series that it’s based on that’s keeping up the fandom.

        There’s been a trickle of spin-off material like mangas, OVAs, light novels, etc. but recently they’re riding the hype train because Code Geass R3 is like the anime version of Duke Nukem Forever.

        The creators have alternatively teased the idea and firmly denied that they’re working on it pretty much since R2 ended in 2008. Then they actually announced it in 2016, with basically no information other than the title. Now we know that it’s going to be a movie like the R1 and R2 movies, but this time not just reused animation from the show and a few minutes of plot spackle.

    • Samu says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:45 am

      Not really. Code Geass has too many Diabolus ex Machina moments in my opinion. I, for one, am far more excited for Vinland Saga. I’ve read a little bit of the manga and it’s great.

      • Nornagest says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:07 pm

        Vinland Saga is great, but it’s structured weirdly and I’m not sure it’d make the transition to TV well. Still, I’d be excited to watch a decent adaptation of the prologue arc (which is long enough for two or three seasons on its own).

    • Walter says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:38 am

      It’s hard to imagine new Code Geass. Like, the engine of the show was the conflict between Suzaku and Lelouch, and they were pretty much reconciled by the end. The bad guys were Lelouch’s older brother and his parents, and they all get taken care of. Like, absent new villains just showing up who never got mentioend before (presumably a CC-esque entity gives them magic powers of their own) its hard to see where the story goes from here.

  5. C_B says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:50 am

    Hunting for an old, vaguely remembered SSC post; hoping the commentariat can help me find it:

    Once upon a time (I would say at least two years ago, but well after the switch from LiveJournal to SSC), Scott posted a link to a defense of “sodomy” (really homosexuality) written by some academic surprisingly early – I wanna say 15th or 16th century or something. The defense itself wasn’t anything surprising (basically, “they’re not hurting anybody and seem like they’re having fun”), it was just the publication date that was interesting. I thought it was in a links post, but I’ve scoured those and can’t find what I’m looking for.

    The only other thing I remember was that Scott’s commentary on it was something like “turns out if you have consistent principles, you can come to conclusions centuries ahead of their time.”

    • Alejandro says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:14 am

      It was about Jeremy Bentham. Here is the SSC link post.

      • C_B says:
        February 6, 2019 at 11:26 am

        Yaaaay, thanks! That’s less early than I thought I remembered, though, so way less surprising. Ah, well!

    • John Schilling says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:40 am

      Bentham, right. Of course, the conclusions he came to were that homosexuality would not be a social problem because it was absolutely inconceivable that two adult men would ever want to have sex with one another and so male homosexuality could not disrupt normal adult sexual or marital relations, and that there was no reasonable basis for objecting to adult men having harmless sexyfuntimes with adolescent boys. Also, women can’t have sex with women, that’s physically impossible so lay off the crazy talk.

      What century will it be when any of those conclusions are broadly vindicated?

      • C_B says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:33 pm

        Those aren’t his arguments. I know because I just reread the essay!

        homosexuality would not be a social problem because it was absolutely inconceivable that two adult men would ever want to have sex with one another and so male homosexuality could not disrupt normal adult sexual or marital relations

        This isn’t part of his argument. He does talk a lot about Greek boy-fucking, but doesn’t make the claim that this is the only kind of pederasty; his definition is just, “making use of an object [for sexual gratification]…of the proper species but the wrong sex.”

        His arguments that pederasty won’t disrupt the institution of marriage are:

        – Homosexuality is really rare, so it’s probably not a big deal.
        – In societies where it’s common, men who enjoy sex with men/boys seem to also still enjoy sex with women.
        – There are advantages to marriage other than sex, and these will lead even homosexuals to get married.
        – The limiting factor on women having suitors isn’t the number of willing men, it’s social stigma against sex for women. As long as this is the case, removing a few men from the pool doesn’t change anything; the limiting factor is still how hard society makes it for women to get it on.

        These arguments are mostly bad and/or outdated, but they’re different bad arguments than you’re saying.

        Also, women can’t have sex with women, that’s physically impossible so lay off the crazy talk.

        He also doesn’t say this; he gives lesbians one paragraph, and his position is “this is basically never punished under the current legal regime, so I’m not going to bother arguing against punishing it.”

        • John Schilling says:
          February 6, 2019 at 1:11 pm

          ” but a connection of the other [homosexual] kind, a man must know, will for certain come in time to be followed by disgust. All the documents we have from the ancients relative to this matter, and we have a great abundance, agree in this, that it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest. The very name it went by among the Greeks may stand instead of all other proofs, of which the works of Lucian and Martial alone will furnish any abundance that can be required. Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. ”

          Tell me that’s not a multiply-explicit assertion that no man, not even the gayest of the gay, can ever find another adult man to be sexually desirable, and that homosexuality will therefore be absolutely limited to as you put it “boy-fucking”. Go ahead, try to explain it any other way.

          And that’s a key building block in his argument that tolerance of homosexuality won’t cause social disruption by e.g. depriving women of husbands.

          • C_B says:
            February 6, 2019 at 1:46 pm

            Hm, I think you’re right. I read that section previously as only describing classical behavior, rather than saying it must apply in modern times, but on reread your reading of it is better. I retract my objection!

          • add_lhr says:
            February 6, 2019 at 3:34 pm

            Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy.

            Well, I guess that’s why we decided to call that program CHIP instead…

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:47 pm

        I don’t think homosexuality [or its acceptance] directly causes a decline in marriage. But a society that tolerates homosexuals will likely end up tolerating other marital and sexual decisions that too result in fewer successful marriages.

        Ancient Greek homosexuality was of a very specific kind and wasn’t even that extensive within the society at the time, so not really very good model.

        • dndnrsn says:
          February 6, 2019 at 2:06 pm

          What if you have this backwards – a society that has endorsed personal freedom and well-being over social stability (marriages holding together might be good in aggregate, but it’s unpleasant for people stuck in crappy marriages, and terrible for people in really bad marriages), as was happening in many Western countries in the 60s and 70s, is open to accepting homosexuality, because the arguments for not allowing adults to have consensual relations with other adults are very similar to the arguments for insisting that people who are in bad marriages stay in them. Open tolerance of sexual promiscuity among heterosexuals predates open tolerance of homosexuality, also.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            February 7, 2019 at 3:18 am

            I have the chronology backwards but not the causality backwards. Gay rights came before the major changes that collapsed marriage. I just meant to say that lax attitudes would cause both.

            I’m not convinced you could easily compartmentalize these things unless your elite and your culture at large is consciously trying to see what actions are permissible in a society within the constraint of trying to maintain the prevalence of stable marriages. If individual happiness and expression are the terminal goals then all of that gets thrown out the window.

          • dndnrsn says:
            February 7, 2019 at 4:11 am

            Did gay rights come before the changes to marriage? According to Wikipedia, it looks like actual lawyers started pushing no-fault divorce in the 60s. It looks as though the US was a divorcing-er place than the rest of the world before that.

            One could imagine a situation where homosexuality is OK but “family” stuff is still fairly conservative: young men being told that they must marry their boyfriend before sex, two women can’t get divorced unless one of them has done something wrong, etc, let’s say. An important question here is the degree to which the relatively greater hedonism of the male-male sex/dating scene was due to some innate characteristic of gay men, some innate characteristic of men in general, the fact that being pushed into the closet disincentivizes open, stable relationships and makes random sketchy bathhouse/rough trade type relationships socially safer (while some guy slipping off to another town to cruise for rough trade stands a greater risk of disease, and a greater risk of getting robbed and/or murdered by said rough trade than if he had a long-term male partner, he’s probably less likely to have people realize “hey, Adam and Steve sure do hang out a lot”), or some combination (I think a combination of 2 and 3).

            Female-female relationships seem less of a relevant question, because while lesbians might have more sexual partners than straight women, it’s a marginal difference IIRC. Probably it’s due to casual sex with another woman being safer in terms of disease, pregnancy, and not getting raped, beaten up, murdered than casual sex with a man; alternatively, if the sex is all happening in monogamous relationships, women are more sensitive to relationship problems and more likely to be the one who breaks up a relationship, so, two women might be more likely to break up. More breakups: more relationships: more sexual partners. Compared to gay men also, women living in relationships with each other were once far more likely to be thought of as “oh look, it’s so sweet how Anna and Eve spend so much time together; it must be nice to have a roommate you get along with so well.”

            Acceptance of homosexuality was linked to personal freedom being increasingly weighed over “social stability” in sexual matters (the change in opinion being enabled by the pill and antibiotics – there was a brief period where condom-free sex was the safest it has ever been and probably ever will be, and it made sex outside of marriage safer for women) but I don’t see that it has to be.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            February 8, 2019 at 3:09 am

            Broad acceptance of gays post-dates broad acceptance of serial monogamy. Laws are not the best indicators of general attitudes simply because they are sometimes rammed through by an elite when public opinion is still leaning against OR kept from being passed after the public is generally in favor of changing things.

            A traditional/”socially conservative” order that tolerates M/M F/F relationships is theoretically possible but simply didn’t ‘evolve’ that way and I see no path to making it so.

            Unless governments resort to “growing babies” without genuine legal [as opposed to merely biological] eventually birth rates will stabilize as more and more of the population is born to parents living a more traditional lifestyle. (As liberal, broadly speaking, lifestyles are reproductive sinks as are liberal areas) What this means for homosexuals isn’t immediately clear.

  6. benjdenny says:
    February 6, 2019 at 11:04 am

    Are people looking for low-to-mid level jobs writing cover letters anymore? I’m in an ok-ish (by my standards) paying job and occasionally apply for things that would be quite a bit better (45-55k secretary jobs). At my current on-paper qualification level, I don’t think I’d be getting a ton of callbacks in the first place, but I haven’t been writing cover letters and I’m not sure if I should take the time to make a customization template for use on each application. If you do write them, do you find it time-effective to do so?

    • johan_larson says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:46 am

      I’ve been advised not to write cover letters. They tend to get lost in modern application processing systems. Instead, I have been advised to put a brief summary paragraph at the beginning of the resume, explaining what I am applying for and outlining my qualifications.

    • dodrian says:
      February 6, 2019 at 12:17 pm

      Anecdotally, I’ve had more callbacks when submitting a cover letter with an application, both in my job search two years ago and in my current one. I’m a software engineer with ~3 years experience

      I have a template with a paragraph introduction touching on my goals and experience (this is similar to a paragraph at the top of my CV), a couple of bullet points mention positive impacts I’ve made to companies I have worked at previously, and a short closing paragraph asking to speak with the recruiter/HR/company to talk about how I would make a positive impact on the company.

      When submitting an application I tweak the letter it a little – making sure the technologies I list in my experience match what the job description is asking for (C#?, Javascript? Python?), and choosing the most relevant experience points that mirror the needs of the company (problem solving, communicating with clients, working on a team, etc). It takes a couple minutes.

      I haven’t tracked specifically by numbers, but it feels like I get more callbacks when I do that.

    • Lambert says:
      February 6, 2019 at 12:45 pm

      Every application I’ve ever made has either asked me to upload a cover letter, or had a text field for one.

    • cassander says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:12 pm

      When I hire people, I largely ignore cover letters. I will usually scan them to see if they mention a few key terms, but that’s about it. Usually they don’t and they’re usually to short and bland to be an indication of how well someone can right. On the job seeking side, I’m not sure it’s worth the time to write them. If you do bother, be sure to mention something specifics about the job/company/your skills that indicates you have something particular they’re looking for or are particularly interested in them, especially if it’s something that’s not on your resume.

      Also, be sure that you don’t appear overqualified for the positions you’re applying for. I will ignore people that are too qualified for the positions I’m trying to fill because I know that they’ll want more money than I’m offering or won’t stick around. Better to apply for positions that are a stretch than ones you’re too qualified for.

      • Elementaldex says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:20 pm

        When I’m hiring I often get hundreds of applications. I don’t generally read the cover letters (unless I’ve already decided to bring someone in for an interview). But I often discard everyone without a cover letter just to make the numbers manageable. This is for low wage positions.

      • cassander says:
        February 6, 2019 at 4:53 pm

        ugh, two typos in a sentence about good writing. that’s embarrassing…

    • Randy M says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:19 pm

      For a cover letter, just take the job posting and rewrite it in the affirmative. Like,
      “Thank you for considering my resume for a Monkey-brain dissector. As you can see from my resume, I have more than 4 years experience with the Acme Brain Dissector, and am skilled with Powerpoint and work great alone or as a team member. I would be a great fit for this role at Playschool toys, Inc.”

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:47 pm

      I wrote them for most job applications, and noticed more responses from the times I had them vs. times I did not. However, I also put more effort into the resumes submitted with cover letters….so YMMV.

      I wrote enough of them that it become quite simple and quick, like churning out serial genre fiction. So, they never were burdensome for me.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 6, 2019 at 3:02 pm

      I think it really depends on the place you’re applying; covering letters don’t really do much as regards the information which will be extracted from your CV or resumé, but they do help in the appearance of applying for the job – just sending in a CV on its own looks like you’re firing off a bunch of them to all different companies and not putting in the effort about “It has been my life-long dream and ambition since early childhood to work for Widgeon’s Widgets”.

      Some places do care about that, some don’t.

    • Erusian says:
      February 6, 2019 at 5:14 pm

      I’ve hired secretaries. Cover letters are more common there than in other professions. I usually quickly scan them. If they’re too generic they make no impact either way. If they’re good they can be a positive. If they’re bad then they will be a negative. But it will at least draw my attention a little more.

      My process is to have a set number of slots and to look at the total thing I get passed (which is usually a packet). I do multiple passes. First I discard everyone who is obviously bad. Then I start cutting people until I have that number. If it’s hard to narrow it down then a good cover letter would make a difference.

      My biggest piece of advice on resumes, cover letters, etc, is to have a personality. Write something the interviewer will remember. This is especially true for a secretary, whose personality is important to the position.

      • benjdenny says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:23 am

        Thank you for this, and to everyone that replied (I’m pretty sure it would be overkill to reply to every response, but I really do appreciate all the effort).

        What I’m getting from everybody is a range from “Probably doesn’t matter, but can’t hurt unless you are a shitty writer” to “Helps a lot, since it’s at minimum a little bit of extra effort and we get a lot of applications”. So I guess I’m doing them again!

        • cassander says:
          February 7, 2019 at 8:47 am

          One does have to consider the cost in time. If you spend an hour searching for jobs, you might do better just shotgunning on linkdin and applying to 30 places, rather than workin on cover letters for one or two.

          • Randy M says:
            February 7, 2019 at 9:35 am

            What I’ve found from Linked in is that clicking “apply” takes you to a page where you have to register for some applicant tracking system, fill in some details, then go to an employer specific page where you upload a resume, cover letter, and often then click through and enter all that information again in electronic form.

        • dick says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:39 am

          I’d advise you to think of the cover letter as the answer to the question “Please write a short business email to demonstrate that you’re able to write a short business email.”

        • Erusian says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:24 am

          My suggestion to cut down on effort: remember that your personality is pretty constant. The question you want to answer is ‘who are you and what can you do’, not write paeans to the company you’re applying to. I’ve traded notes with people and seen that someone sent the exact same cover letter to multiple people with slight modifications. A few people have been offended. I, and the majority, doesn’t care. From our perspective, we want to know who you are and what you do.

    • A1987dM says:
      February 7, 2019 at 1:05 am

      I (a physicist) do include a cover letter with my application, but a very short one, which doesn’t include any information not also on my CV.

    • brad says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:51 am

      I don’t know about for the kinds of roles you are looking for specifically, but as someone that’s neck deep in hiring right now, I will say that the one guy out of 100+ that wrote in an entertaining and compelling way in the free form sections of our job application got a phone screen even though he probably shouldn’t have based on his resume. (Incorrectly as it turns out, the resume signal was correct, but he got a shot when other people didn’t.)

      • benjdenny says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:26 am

        I’m a secretary; I’m looking at mid-to-high-end secretary jobs to eventually replace my low-to-mid end one that I’m happy in but doesn’t pay enough for the long term. I’m in a usually negative “Very capable, but not credentialed to the extent most desire” hole that I’m slowly filling in with expensive paper.

        I feel like your anecdote is my usual fantasy about the cover letter – like “Yes, we need someone with ten times as much experience, but this kid wrote a zinger of a letter” and then I convince them I’m competent in the face-to-face.

        • Deiseach says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:20 am

          That does sound like a covering letter would help you; if you don’t have the formal Bachelor’s Degree in Sorting Biros as required by the place you’re applying to put down on your CV but you’ve worked jobs where you’ve done biro-sorting in different formats, then you mention that in your letter (“In my prior role at Smiths, Smythes and Smithers as administrative assistant, part of my duties was to oversee and check the sorting of biros received in monthly consignments”).

        • brad says:
          February 7, 2019 at 4:24 pm

          It’s just one data point and the guy wasn’t an order of magnitude away from where he should have been, but reading through applications is boring work and the people that do it are human. Well, at least they are where I work.

  7. johan_larson says:
    February 6, 2019 at 11:12 am

    Oh, dear. The Victorians were right. Masturbation is bad for you. Very, very bad for you. Probably worse than leaded gas. The damage is cumulative, and no amount is entirely safe.

    Fortunately, we have the power of modern science and technology at our disposal. How can we use them to keep our precious youths from, you know, waxing sentimental?

    • Radu Floricica says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:31 am

      Cheap sexbots? Or, well, a very promiscuous society and contraceptive implants.

    • lvlln says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:50 am

      Legalized prostitution + exemption to statutory rape laws when the underage party is the customer of a prostitute + subsidies for purchasing services of a prostitute starting around 10 or 11? Depending on how bad masturbation actually turned out to be, the cure might be worse than the disease, though, and the devil’s in the details.

    • The Pachyderminator says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:59 am

      Honestly, I can’t think of a way that modern technology would help. Best I can come up with is the doubtfully effective old-fashioned methods:
      – raising kids, especially boys of course, from an early age to be fearful and suspicious of their own sexuality;
      – vague warnings to adolescents about the dangers of self-abuse–nothing too specific, or it’ll only give them ideas;
      – most importantly, arranged marriages for everyone as early as possible.
      Anything that encourages sexual practice (sexbots, encouraging promiscuity) or knowledge will have the opposite of the desired effect.

      EDIT: Okay, modern technology could help if you’re willing to be pretty dystopian. It might be possible to fit children with a device that scans either bodily responses or brain activity and can detect orgasms (that occur while awake), and perpetrators who are caught this way can be given some deterrent punishment. But it seems likely that such a device might yield false positives.

      • Randy M says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:00 pm

        Don’t forget circumcision and bland breakfasts!

      • Deiseach says:
        February 6, 2019 at 2:58 pm

        Don’t need to go that far, wasn’t there discussion in regard to the various anti-depressants about how some of them have the side-effect of blunting sex drive/desire/ability to have sex?

        Just isolate that bit out and dose the at-risk young, the same way as the legendary “bromide in the tea for the British army” (even if that was more of an urban myth), until they’re old enough to marry and channel that sexual desire into legitmate and healthy channels (better than subsidising ten year olds to visit prostitutes).

    • Randy M says:
      February 6, 2019 at 12:31 pm

      No one has mentioned banning pornography yet? From the hard stuff to the suggestive advertising.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:34 pm

        And strike down laws against public nudity, lest they masturbate to the bare skin in National Geographic?

      • Nornagest says:
        February 6, 2019 at 12:38 pm

        Probably infeasible. You could make a decent amount of headway against porn per se, though it’s harder now than it would have been pre-Internet, but you’re never going to get rid of Victoria’s Secret ads and the equivalent, not to the point where you can ban anything that a non-negligible fraction of teenage boys would find titillating.

        I mean, these are teenage boys we’re talking about. In the absence of anything racier, they’d probably find buttocks-shaped rocks titillating.

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:00 pm

        Anyone with a webcam can produce pornography, so in theory you would need to basically develop an AI that can scrub the entire internet of pornographic images. Given the quantity of porn and online images in general that would need to be scrubbed, even a highly accurate image reading program would mis-flag millions if not billions of images.

        It would likely be easier to genetically or chemically induce complete sexual apathy then to actually clamp down on every source. Eliminating the harm of and the desire for such things.

        akin to genetically engineering humans that get no positive reaction from opiates or something.

    • AG says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:13 pm

      But what part exactly in masturbation is the part bad for you? Would virtual masturbation have the same effects (just by thinking about it)? Is the physical stimulation (touching the part) or the arousal (transfer of hormones) to blame?
      Because my initial thought is “induce minor wireheading” such that they can get their pleasure fix from something else, but if it’s the endorphins rush itself that’s the issue…

      Isolate the libido genes and use CRISPR to render everyone asexual.

    • SamChevre says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:51 pm

      Where’s J Edgar Nation?

      I did not sow, I did not spin,
      And thanks to pills I did not sin.
      I loved the crowds, the stink, the noise,
      And when I peed I peed turquoise.

      • SamChevre says:
        February 8, 2019 at 7:30 am

        OK, I’m curious: was this boring, or incomprehensible? It’s one of my favorite modern-ish stories.

    • arlie says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:20 pm

      *roflmao*

      You really need to be more specific about exactly what causes the problem.

      Given that, go with Radu Floricica’s basic plan – give everyone horny lots and lots of harmless ways to get their rocks off. Whatever ways are actually harmless in your scenario. You’d probably have to reject many modern and not so modern customs and moral principles in the process – in particular, horny non-adults need to be included in your solution. (There goes statuatory rape, though you could encourage them to satisfy themselves with people near them in age, rather than with adults.)

      OTOH, I’m unclear just how bad leaded gas actually was. (Give me a number for average reduction of life expectancy, and perhaps another for life expectancy reduction at the 99th percentile (worse affected). also numbers for degrees of impairment short of death, and their likelihood…) Maybe this belongs in the “just live with it” range – I honestly don’t know.

      Perhaps the best solution – not at all technological – would be to remodel your culture to follow the bonobo chimpanzee pattern – teach everybody that if someone’s getting at all upset, the natural thing to do is to invite them to have sex with you, and to eagerly offer to join when you see this happening (caring about attractiveness, or relationships, or anything else is kind of weird :-()

      Of course that won’t work if e.g. the problem with masturbation turns out to be caused by sex not involving a strong monagamous relationship. Which brings me back to my basic question – what in particular causes the problem?

    • JPNunez says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:20 am

      Implants that ring a loud alarm whenever you touch yourself innapropiately.

      Which then are hacked to just sound loud randomly and also do DDoS on online games for ransom.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:57 am

      Contraceptive implants for both sexes (I am sure something can be worked out with the spermicidal properties of copper. I do not think anyone has tried this, but dropping a copper shotgun-pellet into your nut-sack would probably work for reversible sterilization.) and a ridiculously sex-positive society?

      Alternatively, there are drugs that kill your libido stone dead.

  8. DragonMilk says:
    February 6, 2019 at 11:31 am

    As the world becomes more automated, what will the next generation do for a living?

    I’m no luddite, but I’m genuinely curious how useful a lot of the population will be in the future. At a basic level, food and housing has been taken care of ever since the agricultural revolution, so everything else is about producing and managing gravy.

    What is the future gravy?

    • Elementaldex says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:35 am

      Probably entertainment. Entertaining education, fitness, art, performance. etc.

    • Randy M says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:50 am

      A job or a career is a way to produce something of value to someone who can offer something you want in return.
      In a future where all necessities are automated, who has anything to offer? Owners of industry–robots, or landlords, or politicians who get paid from the taxes on such. What are these elites willing to pay for? MY somewhat optimistic predictions:

      -Personal service. In such a future it might pay very well to be attractive, well-mannered, and happy to do various menial tasks. Some of the elites may prefer automation, ie, roombas, Alexa, etc., but as these get mass produced and available to more middle and lower classes, they may prefer to have the human touch. A chauffeur to open the door to their automated electric car, a cook, butler, landscaper, etc., all of which serve only them and know their unique tastes.

      -Creativity. From the above groups might come the funds to pay people to write, direct (imagine a program that can create realistic video from CGI based on simple instructions like “Woman walking down the street in Paris”), compose, make games, and discuss all these. Call me old fashioned, but I think story-telling will be a human dominated field for some time, despite ai attempts to mimic it. Now of course we can have Hollywood producing one movie that everyone sees, but there might be large swaths making a living by producing works for niche communities–playing games created based on some fan work derived from some other sci-fi version of an older novel, etc. Nothing critics call art, but not a bad way to spend time and build networks.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:50 am

      I’m not sure how this would work out as a societal structure, but one thing people do is prevent loneliness in other people.

      • Wrong Species says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:16 am

        Have you ever talked with a chatbot? You can’t have anything resembling a real life conversation, even at its most basic. And that’s just one of many problems with trying to simulate a person.

    • Plumber says:
      February 6, 2019 at 12:26 pm

      I imagine that with increased automation thr “jobs of the future” will incrasimgly ne as bodyguards, escorts; flunkies, prostitutes, and valets.

      Basically flattereing, and being an entourage for those with the wealth to pay.

      So beggers and “courtiers”

      I imagine the legal owners of the productive robots will pay for the status marker of having others act subservient towards them.

      Lots of historical precedent for this.

      Opera slippers on human faces forever, or until Morlocks begin to eat the Eloi.

      • Viliam says:
        February 7, 2019 at 2:55 pm

        A part of jobs will be producing manually things that a machine could have done cheaper and better, just because rich people will find the idea of poor people doing useless work amusing.

        Therefore, some introverts may still be able to survive.

    • AG says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:08 pm

      “Authenticity.” Mass produced products will be for the lower classes. Elites get all of their stuff painstakingly hand made.

      insert “Sometimes… Things That Are Expensive… Are Worse” clip here

    • Erusian says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:22 pm

      Okay, so I had a rather long discussion about this before my partner disappeared while debating UBI. Here’s the thing: automation only makes economic sense if automation can produce the products more cheaply than with human labor. If it can’t, the job continues to exist. Even if it is dead equal, the lack of upfront investment in hiring people means that humans will generally continue to win out.

      So automation will only occur where automation can produce goods or services more cheaply than raw human labor. For every loss of a human job, the price of the good or service goes down.

      This means that as automation increases, prices will fall. As prices fall, real incomes rise across the board. As real incomes rise, jobs that were unsustainable before become viable. For example, youtube reviewers are possible in part because automation and technological advances have made it possible to run a mini-studio relatively cheaply and to subsist on relatively small incomes compared to the major critics and broadcasters. Less capital is needed, so the return on capital is better, and people can live better on smaller incomes than they could in the 1950s (for example).

      There are also three factors that I don’t think are taken into account. First, full automation is rarely incentivized. Generally automation stops when a few relatively low skill workers can do the work. It’s almost never profitable to eliminate every worker in the McDonalds. It could be profitable to reduce them significantly (though this can often mean, due to the effect above, the number of McDonalds and number of McDonalds employees actually goes up!)

      Secondly, it’s rarely profitable to automate things that humans are good at and enjoy. Most automation goes into dull tasks that it’s hard to recruit people for. So things like academia, acting, certain sorts of sales, law… they’re likely to survive. Partly because they’re hard to automate, but even if they weren’t, people enjoy them and will generally pursue them despite low wages. This in turn pushes down wages, which pushes down the profitability of automation and makes it less likely.

      Thirdly, even if we develop PerfectBot, which is better than humans at everything, it still makes sense to employ humans. This is due to Ricardo’s comparative advantage observation: even if one person is better at every task it still makes sense for them to trade and both will be better off from it.

      The future, as the past, is everyone working less in increasingly specialized tasks in return for a better standard of living and of increasing wealth disparity. The two processes are linked.

      People will work supervising or updating auto-factories. They will work selling goods to each other. They will produce much more art and luxury goods. They will go into services especially and there will probably be a profusion of extremely specific service companies (the example I use a lot is dog masseuses). And in addition to this white collar work, there will be hard to automate jobs like plumbing, store clerkship, strawberry picking…

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:39 pm

        Here’s the thing: automation only makes economic sense if automation can produce the products more cheaply than with human labor. If it can’t, the job continues to exist. Even if it is dead equal, the lack of upfront investment in hiring people means that humans will generally continue to win out.

        So automation will only occur where automation can produce goods or services more cheaply than raw human labor. For every loss of a human job, the price of the good or service goes down.

        This means that as automation increases, prices will fall. As prices fall, real incomes rise across the board. As real incomes rise, jobs that were unsustainable before become viable. For example, youtube reviewers are possible in part because automation and technological advances have made it possible to run a mini-studio relatively cheaply and to subsist on relatively small incomes compared to the major critics and broadcasters. Less capital is needed, so the return on capital is better, and people can live better on smaller incomes than they could in the 1950s (for example).

        Agreed. However, minimum wage laws can prevent the step “As real incomes rise, jobs that were unsustainable before become viable” from occurring. Being a Youtube reviewer is petite bourgeois work: if Youtube was legally considered your employer, they’d have to pay you a certain amount per hour of labor or lay you off to avoid committing a crime.
        It seems like the obvious answer to this would be negative income tax, where if you put “Youtube reviewer” or “person who’s paid an hourly pittance to squeeze orange juice instead of a machine” on your tax return, the government sends you a tax refund big enough to bring your weekly wage up to $15*40 or whatever we’ve decided “a living wage” is.

        • Erusian says:
          February 6, 2019 at 4:03 pm

          Agreed. However, minimum wage laws can prevent the step “As real incomes rise, jobs that were unsustainable before become viable” from occurring. Being a Youtube reviewer is petite bourgeois work: if Youtube was legally considered your employer, they’d have to pay you a certain amount per hour of labor or lay you off to avoid committing a crime.

          It seems like the obvious answer to this would be negative income tax, where if you put “Youtube reviewer” or “person who’s paid an hourly pittance to squeeze orange juice instead of a machine” on your tax return, the government sends you a tax refund big enough to bring your weekly wage up to $15*40 or whatever we’ve decided “a living wage” is.

          Yes, but you’re going to see an increasing number of petite bourgeois as highly specialized non-scalable professions become more common. Minimum wage has other negative effects but it would only stop this if it were applied in the way you describe, which it isn’t to my knowledge. The minimum wage doesn’t guarantee a certain income but a certain number of dollars per hour as an employee, and only an employee.

          The issue with a negative income tax is that it discourages labor from entering the market. If the government decides that every person is entitled to at least an income at the poverty line (say, $12,000) and a person could work and make $6,000, they are incentivized to not do that work. They end up with $12,000 either way and working is not fun.

          This not only has an immediate effect but creates a lack of skill and career growth that could lead to future earnings. In effect, a NIT creates a marginal value of an earned dollar of $0 minus whatever pains the person has to put in to work/get a job for the first $12,000 dollars (or whatever). This means it’s effectively a negative gain for each dollar earned. This is significantly worse than the current situation.

          I’ve toyed with the idea of an income supplement but that would be a distinct policy in many ways.

          • mendax says:
            February 7, 2019 at 7:16 am

            I’d always thought that the advantage of Negative Income Tax was that it would avoid the problem you describe (shared with UBI and the welfare trap) with a clever set up of tax brackets and marginal rates so that if you increase your income by ($N < cutoff level) your NIT received would always be reduced by less than $N, but a brief reading right now shows that's not an essential or common element.

      • DragonMilk says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:44 am

        Actually, if you were to present to me a robot and person that does the exact same thing, I would likely choose the robot:

        One can depreciate the robot expense, while the person requires income taxes and benefits
        The person can quit, the robot can’t, and maintenance is generally more predictable than HR
        The robot won’t ever sue you for sexual harassment, injury, or otherwise, or threaten to unionize
        The robot won’t grow old and sue you for wrongful termination, or ask for a raise

        What I’m really describing is the incentives for capital over labor investments, and it’s what companies are already doing. Of course there will still be need for “some” humans, but by definition, productivity means either getting more out of a person, or replacing them. So where do the extra laborers go?

        • Erusian says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:22 pm

          Actually, if you were to present to me a robot and person that does the exact same thing, I would likely choose the robot:

          One can depreciate the robot expense, while the person requires income taxes and benefits
          The person can quit, the robot can’t, and maintenance is generally more predictable than HR
          The robot won’t ever sue you for sexual harassment, injury, or otherwise, or threaten to unionize
          The robot won’t grow old and sue you for wrongful termination, or ask for a raise.

          Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point, but it appears to me you’re saying: “Even if the robot and person have the same cost, the person has other costs that make the robot preferable.” Which doesn’t seem to undercut my point that robots only get used if they cost less. It just points out there are non-monetary costs.

          What I’m really describing is the incentives for capital over labor investments, and it’s what companies are already doing. Of course there will still be need for “some” humans, but by definition, productivity means either getting more out of a person, or replacing them. So where do the extra laborers go?

          This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. The amount of labor desired by the market is not static and automation doesn’t necessarily decrease the amount of labor demanded. The classic example is bank tellers. Automation at the banks decreased the number of tellers per banking center but increased the number of banking centers, which actually led to an increase both in total payroll, average wages, and profits. Plus the increase in real income caused by cheaper services available to everyone. This pattern repeated with McDonalds and several other service companies.

          So it’s not at all apparent to me that automation is going to decrease human employment in the sectors that are automated. But it definitely is apparent to me that it will decrease prices and increase real incomes, and therefore open up entirely new professions that were impossible before. Seriously, technology has generally increased the demand for labor. The losers aren’t usually laborers but skilled professionals whose skills are rendered obsolete.

          • DragonMilk says:
            February 8, 2019 at 7:13 am

            I didn’t contend labor would decrease, I’m asking what form it will take – and pointing out that specific labor gets replaced faster than one would assume because for various incentive reasons (tax, regulatory, accounting), robots are easier to deal with than people.

          • Erusian says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:38 am

            I didn’t contend labor would decrease, I’m asking what form it will take –

            What form what will take? Labor?

            and pointing out that specific labor gets replaced faster than one would assume because for various incentive reasons (tax, regulatory, accounting), robots are easier to deal with than people.

            With respect, while you’re pointing out something valid, I did account for it in my model. We must take into account all costs, not just the monetary ones.

      • Viliam says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:05 pm

        even if we develop PerfectBot, which is better than humans at everything, it still makes sense to employ humans. This is due to Ricardo’s comparative advantage observation: even if one person is better at every task it still makes sense for them to trade and both will be better off from it.

        The argument by comparative advantage assumes that the transaction costs in trade are negligible, and — more importantly — that you can’t simply build more PerfectBots.

        With enough PerfectBots, the hypothetical extra epsilon utility you could get from also trading with humans is not worth the extra complications coming from such trade.

        • Erusian says:
          February 7, 2019 at 3:47 pm

          No, it only presumes that building Perfectbots does not cost less than the transaction costs of using human labor. If it does, then the presumption holds. If it doesn’t, we are in a situation where building a robot that is superior to humans in every way costs less than eating out at a restaurant. I’m not sure it’s possible to get there even thermodynamically.

          And of course, a Perfectbot is an absurd scenario to begin with, as outlined in the rest of the argument.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:03 pm

      Food and housing aren’t really solved problems, they are just extended problems. There’s just a lot more people in food distribtuion, food marketing, food processing, and food serving than there are actual farmers.

      Housing is quite expensive and has a huge industry to support construction, from framing to electricity to plumbing to lobbying for code requirements.

      New capital frees up labor to do different things. Once the technological singularity hits, I don’t know, because it’s a singularity, and I can’t look into singularities.

    • cassander says:
      February 6, 2019 at 6:32 pm

      things we currently think of as frivolous. For example, I have a good friend who works at oculus. He literally makes toys for a living. If you’d told his great grandfather that his descendant would make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year making toys for adults that cost hundreds of dollars, he’d have laughed at you.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:54 am

      Health care.

  9. Le Maistre Chat says:
    February 6, 2019 at 12:08 pm

    Scientists can make male ferrets homosexual with bilateral damage to their sexually dimorphic nucleus. If also castrated and given estradiol, they display female-typical receptive behavior in response to neck gripping by another male.

  10. jaimeastorga2000 says:
    February 6, 2019 at 12:27 pm

    The recent discussion about communism reminded me of an essay Mike Wong wrote, “Karl Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto'” tearing apart Karl Marx’s most famous work. Which in turn reminded me of the essay he wrote that essay to support, “The Economics of Star Trek”, which argues that the TNG-era Federation is a communist society. He makes a surprisingly strong case.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:25 pm

      I just read his Communist Manifesto article and agree with it. That’s not surprising, since the biggest influences on his thinking are clearly Burke and Darwin.

      we all strive to become “financially independent” (read: “bourgeoisie”) someday, and many of us achieve that goal, even from the humblest beginnings. He also ignored the existence of the middle class (which has actually grown since his era, rather than shrinking away to nothing in his predicted polarization). Most of the middle class has both employment and investment income, and will eventually retire to live off their money, thus making them the true middle ground between wage earners and capitalists: at different stages of their lives, they will be both.

      This implies that the middle class doesn’t need state-controlled pensions (eg US Social Security). The emphasis he puts on this point implies that the size of the middle class in industrial modernity is an important argument against Marxism, which makes anything that hollows out the middle class problematic.

      The only role for the government of a true free-market economy is to ensure free competition rather than monopoly (which destroys choice), and to provide security and infrastructure for its citizens. The vast disparity in living conditions between communist states and free-market states is proof that the lack of a central controlling authority is not the glaring weakness that he claimed it to be.

      There really weren’t any free-market states by the time the Soviet Union fell. Liberal democracies or whatever we want to call them moved away from the “just police, military and infrastructure” model of government the English-speaking people pioneered. I would infer that Wong is a “mistake theorist” who thinks the trend toward “mixed economies” in the First World is voters voting ignorantly when free-market liberalism would best serve their interests.

      An entire social class cannot seize power. Instead, it can only appoint representatives to take that power. No matter what flowery language Karl Marx chooses to use, the simple reality is that government power will always be in the hands of the few, regardless of whether that government is communist or capitalist. The only question is how much power we want that government to have, and Marx made the mistake of assuming that the more power the government had, the more power the masses would have.

      This is one of his best points, though he doesn’t credit Robert “Iron Law of Oligarchy” Michels. 🙂

      I haven’t read his Star Trek thing.

      • Eric Rall says:
        February 6, 2019 at 1:53 pm

        Based on my studies of Marx, he made three key errors on economics, without which his conclusions don’t follow:

        1. He repeated an assumption common to pre-Marx classical economists (most notably Thomas Malthus) that in a competitive market, wages for general labor would be competed down to subsistence levels. Malthus had the misfortune to identify and describe a pattern that had held for the entire sweep of human history up to the point he was writing (1805), right when it stopped being true due to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capital as a significant third factor of production (in addition to land and labor).

        2. Marx identified the concept of surplus value (the gap between the labor cost and market price of a product, which we now refer to as “Producer Surplus”), but dismissed the significance of the similar gap between market price and use value (“Consumer Surplus”). If you only see producer surplus but overlook or dismiss consumer surplus, market economies look a lot more unfair than they really are.

        3. Marx equivocated between “Labor” referring to present labor (workers right now) and the fruits of past labor reinvested in improving productivity (tools, facilities, processes, technology, etc), and used this equivocation to argue that because present + past labor is responsible for all current production, but present labor only received part of the benefit of current production, then present labor is being exploited.

        • cassander says:
          February 6, 2019 at 6:28 pm

          you left out “writing a 1000 page book called capital without once addressing the concept of risk”. Marx treats capital as risk free, ignoring the fact at the end of the day, the laborer has cold hard cash and the owner of the chair factory has a bunch of chairs that he doesn’t want that he needs to sell on an open market.

          • Eric Rall says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:38 pm

            If I’d added a fourth point, that would have been it. The fifth point would have been Marx also ignoring the need for returns on time due to time preferences and opportunity costs.

        • Douglas Knight says:
          February 6, 2019 at 6:30 pm

          Have you traced the argument? Do these assumptions really matter? In particular, it’s not clear to me that 1 affects his arguments.

          Number 2 isn’t a factual error, so it can’t undermine economic predictions. I’m not sure what you’re saying in Number 3, but I think it is similar, just the use of moral language.

          • citizencokane says:
            February 6, 2019 at 7:23 pm

            Marx always began his arguments by abstracting away as many factors as possible to identify how essential features affected a system in isolation, “holding all other things equal.” Then he would re-introduce complications that he had abstracted away. He planned on writing an entire book on world trade, which undoubtedly would have taken account of risk—not as a mechanism by which surplus-value was produced, but rather by which it was distributed.

          • Eric Rall says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:43 pm

            It’s been a long time since I’ve read Marx closely (coming up on 20 years), but I remember #1 featuring prominently in Communist Manifesto and at least one of his other major works (maybe German Ideology?). #2 was also prominent in the same works, both as a moral argument and as amplification of #1 (proposed as a consequence and a reinforcing mechanism for #1), and both #2 and #3 were central to Capital.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          February 6, 2019 at 7:33 pm

          wages for general labor would be competed down to subsistence levels.

          In the sophisticated version of this (Ricardo), “subsistence” means that wage at which the working class reproduces itself, not that wage required to support life. Thus Ricardo argues that it is a good thing for workers to acquire more luxurious tastes, because it will then require a higher income to make them willing to bear the cost of having and rearing enough children to replace themselves.

        • citizencokane says:
          February 6, 2019 at 7:51 pm

          2. Marx identified the concept of surplus value (the gap between the labor cost and market price of a product, which we now refer to as “Producer Surplus”), but dismissed the significance of the similar gap between market price and use value (“Consumer Surplus”).

          If a capitalist sells a product for a greater price than he has spent on its inputs (labor-power + materials + machinery, etc.), that is no guarantee that the capitalist in that instance has produced surplus-value. There is always the possibility, if the only information we have is a set of prices rather than values, that the capitalist has simply sold the product at a price above its value, or that the capitalist has bought the inputs at prices below their values. In such a case, there has only been a re-arrangement of value. What one capitalist gains by selling above value or buying below value, there must be a counterparty who sold below value or bought above value. This is what Marx commended Sir James Steuart for first noticing.

          Marx abstracts away from prices when discussing the origin of surplus-value because he wants to show that, while individual capitalists can profit by merely ensuring that their sale prices exceed their purchase prices, the capitalist class as a whole cannot profit in such a way because for every capitalist who buys cheap and sells dear, there must be one who buys dear and sells cheap to the same extent. Prices are an obfuscating distraction when investigating the origin of (aggregate) surplus-value.

          As for “consumer surplus,” this is merely a surplus in subjective utility, as evaluated by the person who has just exchanged one equivalent value in money for another equivalent value in commodities. A consumer has not accumulated value just because the loaf of bread now in his possession seems more useful to him than the slip of paper (dollar) that he used to possess. If that were the way to accumulate value, then it would be trivially easy for me to accumulate value: I judge a paper dollar bill to be nearly the most useless thing ever. You can’t eat it. Heck, you can’t even easily wipe your ass with it. If I traded all of my paper dollars for even one loaf of bread, what a rate of profit I’d be making, right? In utility terms, perhaps. But in value terms, which is what Marx cared about, no. The profit of which Marx speaks is not a profit in terms of utility, but a profit in terms of value, which is social power. It is a question of how many other commodities an individual can command on the market. This social power can be objectively measured. It has nothing to do with consumer surplus.

        • Scott Alexander says:
          February 7, 2019 at 1:12 am

          Can you explain why the existence of capital prevents wages from being driven down to subsistence level?

          • Eric Rall says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:33 pm

            In general, increasing the quantity of one factor of production (land, labor, capital) while the other two are held constant will increase total production at a diminishing marginal rate, giving diminishing returns to that factor while increasing the marginal value of the other two factors.

            For example, consider one person farming one acre of land, producing X amount of crop a year. Adding another identical person and another identical acre at the same time would give you about 2X crops/year (each farmer tends half the two-acre farm), or perhaps a bit more if they can specialize and produce economies of scale.

            But if you add the second farmer to the original one-acre farm, you’re going to get more than X crops (by planting more densely and weeding more thoroughly, perhaps) but less than 2X. Maybe 1.2X or 1.5X. Similarly, if you add a second acre but only have one farmer, you’re going to get more crop (since he can plant more land), but less than 2X because he has twice as much farm to tend and doesn’t have time to weed as thoroughly, monitor the crop as closely, etc.

            In a competitive market, we expect wages to be correlated fairly strongly with marginal productivity, regardless of whether you’re in a two-factor or three-factor economy.

            In a two-factor (Maltheusian) economy, capital is negligible (technically, it exists (e.g. digging with shovels instead of your hands), but it’s cheap and ephemeral compared to capital in a modern economy), with labor and land dominating the equation. And the quantity of land available to the society (short of conquest and settlement of new territory) is more-or-less fixed. So increased population (at a given level of technology) means reduced per-capita production, putting a lower and lower ceiling on standard of living.

            The usual pattern observed with Maltheusian economies is that shocks that increase productivity (climate shifts, technological improvements, etc) or reduce population (plagues, bloody wars, etc) lead to a significant improvement in standard-of-living for common laborers in the short-to-medium term, but in the long term the population grows and standard-of-living returns to baseline. That’s where the Ricardan definition of “subsistence” that @David Friedman mentioned comes in: before the Demographic Shift (which came significantly after the Industrial Revolution), population growth tracked pretty closely with standard of living (better-paid peasants can afford to feed more kids, so they have more), and a standard of living below a certain point would lead to declining populations while a standard of living above that point would lead to increasing populations. That point is defined as “subsistence” for the purposes of this sort of analysis.

            Where Capital changes the equation is that capital is much less fixed than land. Adding capital makes both labor and land more productive than otherwise, and a steady growth in capital allows per-capita income and standard of living to continue to grow despite population growth, which wasn’t possible in the two-factor economy.

        • Faza (TCM) says:
          February 7, 2019 at 4:04 am

          @Scott:

          Can you explain why the existence of capital prevents wages from being driven down to subsistence level?

          Not Eric, but I think I could have a stab.

          To the extent that labour remains a factor of production, employers (capitalists) are in competition as buyers from a limited labour pool. Every time that a particular employer seeks to lower costs by depressing wages paid, they open themselves up to someone else snatching their valuable employees by paying more. The labour pool does grow, under normal circumstances, but rather slowly, so once full employment is reached, the only way to find someone to work for you is to pay them more.

          In order for a capitalist labour market to result in a depression of wages down to subsistence level, one of the following must hold:
          1. The demand for labour must remain fixed in the long run; perhaps due to the existence of monopsonist employers,

          2. There must exist “anti-poaching” collusion between employers aimed at keeping wages low (hello, Sillicon Valley). This is, naturally, subject to standard Prisoner’s Dilemma type pressures, as well as assaults from outside (market entrants, the existence of other markets).

          Interestingly enough, the mere fact of having to pay more than subsistence works towards diluting the influence of any particular capitalist. Any time a worker (or group of workers) earns a surplus, they obtain capital they can invest in starting a competing business, either individually or collectively, and potentially become competing employers, driving the cycle forward.

          The amusing corollary is that it is in fact in communism, both as envisioned in the Manifesto and actually executed in real life, that the necessary conditions hold for supression of wages: the working masses have no alternative but to work for the wages set by monopsonistic employers, and state violence may be (and very much was) used to ensure that you can’t escape either by emigration or “going off the grid”.

          Aside: the only thing that readily comes to mind as comparable in terms of “accusing our enemies of what we plan to do ourselves” is the Free Software Foundation.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:
            February 7, 2019 at 6:04 am

            Aside: the only thing that readily comes to mind as comparable in terms of “accusing our enemies of what we plan to do ourselves” is the Free Software Foundation.

            Elaborate?

          • Faza (TCM) says:
            February 7, 2019 at 6:18 am

            From the GPL (v. 3 here, but standard language):

            The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

            You have no such freedom and never did. Sharing and changing is contingent on someone writing that software and making it available to you.

            What the GPL does do however, is take away your freedom to license the parts of the software you wrote as you see fit (the “viral” part of the GPL that is its most distinct feature).

            Compare and contrast with the MIT license, say, that confers the same freedoms, but doesn’t actually take away any rights you have in your own work.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            February 7, 2019 at 12:58 pm

            In order for a capitalist labour market to result in a depression of wages down to subsistence level

            The basic argument for the iron law of wages, as per Malthus and refined by Ricardo, is simple and elegant. As long as wages are high enough so that the working class more than reproduces itself, population grows exponentially. Capital might grow exponentially as well but land can’t, and an increased amount of labor and capital applied to the same land to supply an increased population will eventually drive up the cost of food, and continue driving it up until the working population is just reproducing itself.

            Put that way there are a couple of holes in the argument—it depends on some specific assumptions about both technological improvement, which I think Malthus believed was at most linear, and increased output with increased capital. My guess is that a large part of the reason it turned out to be wrong was that land was not, as economists c. 1800 assumed, a major constraint on population.

            If you tell the same story with only 1% of the economy in agriculture, increasing output everywhere else with the increase in population and capital and technology can maintain an expanding population at a constant or rising standard of living for an awful long time, with increasing resources in agriculture making up for diminishing returns. Ricardo in fact made it clear that his model was of the ultimate long run, and that wages could be above their long run equilibrium level for an unlimited length of time.

      • ilikekittycat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 12:35 am

        The only question is how much power we want that government to have, and Marx made the mistake of assuming that the more power the government had, the more power the masses would have.

        Marx’s position on guns* by itself demonstrates how silly this claim is. I’d gotten so used to seeing the meme version of that strawman I had forgotten there were once people stupid enough to believe that unironically.

        * for instance,

        The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

        There is no way to get “just go with what the police say, the state has this” out of that. At best what you have there is another subpar internet screed refuting how Leninist vanguardism turned out without actually addressing what Marx was saying: break out of the centralizing trap that always backfires and concentrates force against the populace, even in socialist transitional states the interests of a powerful standing army will inevitably drift apart from the interests of the workers at large, etc. etc.

        • Civilis says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:16 am

          What Marx was saying may have sense in the era of levée en masse (when he wrote it, admittedly) when the number of troops that could be thrown into battle, even conscripts, meant more to victory than tactics or training. However, it should have been obvious that that state wouldn’t continue indefinitely and that in the future the time would come when any state would need a professional military to have a chance on the battlefield.

          You can see that the Soviet Union tried to follow Marx’s dictates as much as was possible given the change in military thinking and technology with the early Workers and Peasants Red Army, and it seems likely to me that this was a contributing factor to the enormous Soviet losses early in World War II against an opponent that learned the lessons of World War I.

          • dndnrsn says:
            February 7, 2019 at 12:03 pm

            The Red Army did learn the lessons of WWI; some of the pre-war Soviet military theorists were coming up with combined-arms tactics and so forth as good as anything else. Unfortunately, the purges of the military leadership probably hit the smart ones harder than the less-competent-but-undoubtedly-loyal ones. Early in the war, the Germans had the advantage of surprise, and there was significant political interference in military operations – senseless attacks being ordered, withdrawals being countermanded with resulting major encirclements, etc.

          • Civilis says:
            February 7, 2019 at 12:57 pm

            That the purges were a larger factor doesn’t rule out that other factors were involved. If anything, the purges are right in line with what Marx is talking about. If “even in socialist transitional states the interests of a powerful standing army will inevitably drift apart from the interests of the workers at large” the way you limit the military from accumulating power is by suppressing it under the party, with political commissars and, when necessary, purging anyone that gets too much power.

            The Red Army started out without ranks, with elected commanders, and with a large territorial component. While much of that fell by the wayside before the Second World War, it did hamper their development of a modern army and somewhat counteract their development of innovative tactics (if not as much as the purges did).

          • dndnrsn says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:12 pm

            I think a larger factor than either was simply that Stalin did not, early in the war, trust his generals, and it took the disasters of mid-late 1941 and mid-late 1942 for that to change. If tactical and strategic withdrawals had been allowed, the enormous encirclements wouldn’t have happened to the same degree.

    • rlms says:
      February 6, 2019 at 1:45 pm

      It’s not surprising to see someone criticising Marx while displaying a severe misunderstanding of him (“The idea of “social engineering” became popular; people believed that, armed with advancing technology and an enlightened world view, they would be able to tear down the rotten and dysfunctional society that thousands of years of human civilization had slowly constructed, and replace it with a new, improved version”; yes, those people were the utopian socialists Engels argued against in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) but it is somewhat novel to see someone simultaneously display similar lack of understanding of capitalism:

      Like any self-regulating system, a free market economy corrects itself whenever it gets “out of whack”. Sometimes, this correction comes in the form of a recession, and sometimes, it comes in the form of a boom.

    • Dack says:
      February 6, 2019 at 3:00 pm

      TNG isn’t communist. The Federation does not own or control all of the replicators. Post-scarcity society just appears to has some things in common with communism.

  11. SpeakLittle says:
    February 6, 2019 at 1:10 pm

    Would someone with a better understanding of EU tax structures care to comment on the French tax settlement with Apple? The Reuters article seems to use the term back-tax and back-dated tax interchangeably. Some articles described this as the result of an audit, but some are implying it’s related to the EU findings about Apple’s Irish Double.

    • Aapje says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:33 am

      Vestager’s investigation is an audit, so I don’t see how there is any inconsistency.

      When an audit finds that a tax-filing is incorrect, the tax can be amended later on. For example, imagine that I tell the government that my salary is X and they then tell me to pay Y. If they later figure out that my actual salary was higher than I told them, they can tell me to pay more tax. I cannot hold them to their tax assessment that said that I only have to pay Y. From their perspective, I always had to pay more tax, it’s just that they are only now aware of it. Thus the new tax figure is most accurately back-dated, to fix an error in the initial tax assessment.

      Here something similar is going on, where the law was applied incorrectly to Apple and applying it correctly means that they have to pay more in tax. They always had to do this, it’s only now that we became aware of this.

      Of course, a complicating factor here is that the Irish tax office and Apple believe that the audit is wrong and that correct law was already being applied.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:
        February 7, 2019 at 5:08 am

        … Only by the most motivated of reasonings. Apple has billions of reasons to profess that belief, and the Irish tax office would be admitting to operating criminally if they copped to just how ridiculous their tax ruling was.

        Because this is not a complicated area of tax law – The EU treaties are extremely clear you cannot favor one company over another when it comes to tax burdens – the rates must be uniform, and any exemptions rule based and universally available.

        Which, as far as Apples historic treatment by Irish revenue goes, does not even pass the laugh test.

  12. Le Maistre Chat says:
    February 6, 2019 at 2:17 pm

    RPG discourse: megadungeon edition.
    A megadungeon can be defined as an “indoor” environment big enough to run an entire campaign in. The concept goes back at least as far as published RPGs, with Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk. Because Gygax ran “an open table”, the castle and its many underground levels had to contain enough treasure and enemies for many, many player characters to ascend from 0 to ~250,000 XP.
    RPG players who find a megadungeon worthwhile, how do you think play variety should be balanced with verisimilitude? One goal seems to call for “kitchen sink” design, the other for many repetitions of logical room types like bedrooms, workshops, kitchens and dining halls, etc. (Anyone played Dungeon Keeper?)

    • Nornagest says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:41 pm

      I’ve never played a megadungeon outside of roguelike and Diablo-like computer games, but I think I’d struggle with suspension of disbelief in one on tabletop; anything big enough for 20 levels and even vaguely in the style of a traditional dungeon (10-foot corridors, treasure lying around, scarier monsters as you descend levels, mimics everywhere) leaves too many unanswered questions. An Underdark-like setting seems like a better approach to the same basic concept.

      Maybe it could work if you embraced the weirdness and made the dungeon an explicitly supernatural challenge. Let’s say you and your party all pissed off David Bowie, God of Tight Pants and Hairspray, and he hurled you to the bottom of the Labyrinth of Doom, which is punishment for mortals and reality TV for the divines. Get to the surface and he’ll forgive you (and give you a cut of his winnings from gambling on you against the other gods). Fail, and your soul wanders in the labyrinth forever. The catch? There are other parties in the labyrinth, trying to be forgiven by other gods, and they all want to kill you.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:
        February 6, 2019 at 3:09 pm

        Maybe it could work if you embraced the weirdness and made the dungeon an explicitly supernatural challenge. Let’s say you and your party all pissed off a particular god, and he hurled you to the bottom of the Labyrinth of Doom, which is punishment for mortals and reality TV for the divines. Get to the surface and he’ll forgive you (and give you a cut of his winnings from gambling on you against the other gods). Fail, and your soul wanders in the labyrinth forever.

        I don’t play tabletop RPGs, but from a fantasy world-building perspective I’m thinking you could do something like Borges’s “The Library of Babel” or the Walmart apocalypse setting; the entire world is an infinitely repeating dungeon, people live on the first level in areas that have been cleared of danger, it’s been like that for as long as anyone can remember and nobody knows why, food and water come from Tippyverse-style Create Food and Water traps that are randomly scattered throughout, and so on. Perhaps solving the inherent ontological mystery is part of the plot (spoiler alert: everyone is Jesus in purgatory).

        • RDNinja says:
          February 7, 2019 at 6:28 am

          Interesting. It’s very similar to SCP-3008, an infinitely large Ikea store, where lost customers have built walled settlements to protect themselves from monsters.

          The quest hook could be a search for rare resources the towns need from deep in the dungeon, or to investigate why the well dried up

        • vV_Vv says:
          February 7, 2019 at 2:59 pm

          Also relevant, the Megastructure of Blame!, a Dyson sphere city that is constantly being expanded and rearranged in seamingly chaotic patterns over thousands of years by the Builders (out-of-control robots), sparsely inhabited by humans driven near exinction by the Safeguards (hostile out-of-control AIs) and the Silicon Creatures (weird, generally hostile cyborgs), contrasted by the Authority (benevolent, but mostly depowered AIs).

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:10 am

        I think I’d struggle with suspension of disbelief in one on tabletop; anything big enough for 20 levels and even vaguely in the style of a traditional dungeon (10-foot corridors, treasure lying around, scarier monsters as you descend levels, mimics everywhere) leaves too many unanswered questions. An Underdark-like setting seems like a better approach to the same basic concept.

        Maybe it could work if you embraced the weirdness and made the dungeon an explicitly supernatural challenge.

        Well I don’t understand why you’d have 10-foot corridors. Scarier monsters as you descend levels is the gamiest concept in a D&D setting, for sure. The closest I’ve come to rationalizing it is “dungeon as goblin town”: bugbears and ogres live in a walled village on the surface because they can handle sunlight, and gnolls, orcs, and kobolds (which is the same as “goblin”, in German rather than French) are their sunlight-allergic children who have their bedrooms in three levels of tunnels under the village. And yeah, treasure lying around is dumb unless you contextualize it rationally: each family in the dungeon has a strongbox with valuables, temple rooms have healing potions and the most gold, etc.

        The canon Underdark is weird because in a pre-modern worldview, the literal Underworld should be supernatural, while D&D steals that thunder for “the outer planes.”
        The (movie) Labyrinth of doom is a clever take.

        • John Schilling says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:40 am

          Well I don’t understand why you’d have 10-foot corridors.

          The Monsters with Disabilities Act requires that all subterranean corridors be sized for a standard gelatinous cube, and the cubes have CR-20 lawyers on retainer.

        • Nornagest says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:56 pm

          The canon Underdark is weird because in a pre-modern worldview, the literal Underworld should be supernatural,

          See, I think that actually helps it out. If, as various premodern cultures seem to have believed, that cave in the creekbed outside town isn’t there because of a random quirk of carbonate chemistry but is actually a literal portal to the literal underworld, then it makes perfect sense for it to go on forever, for things like demons and dragons and undead to show up in it, and for those things to get weirder and scarier as you go deeper. That’s almost one-for-one compatible with the D&D Underdark. It would take some patchwork for it to go together with the traditional D&D planar cosmology, but you can take or leave most of that cosmology if you’re not playing Planescape. (Eberron, for example, has quite a different cosmology.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:02 pm

            Well yeah, if you leave most of the canon afterlife cosmology, going down into the caves of the Underdark and eventually there are demons and dragons is win-win. Of course the first things you meet are kobold miners and such and only after going much deeper do you meet the scarier demons of Hell.

        • Jiro says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:10 am

          Weaker monsters are on the low end of the monster social and pecking order compared to stronger monsters. Thus weaker monsters get to live in the worse areas. The “worse area” for a monster is a place closer to the surface where it’s easier for the humans to come kill you.

          Also, some Underdark residents live in societies. This society has a center of power located some distance underground. Places near the surface are farther from this center of power and thus places where this society’s influence is weaker.

          Note that neither of these explanations apply only to the Underdark. You’d expect there to be fewer monsters near town where it’s easier for the humans to clear them out and farther away from the Dark Lord’s palace. (Although some of it may manifest in a lower number of monsters rather than each individual monster being weaker.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            February 8, 2019 at 2:56 pm

            Also, some Underdark residents live in societies. This society has a center of power located some distance underground. Places near the surface are farther from this center of power and thus places where this society’s influence is weaker.

            Unless we’ve gone deep enough to be in the Underworld where laws of the material world don’t necessarily apply, an Underdark city needs food. The farmers who live in those societies would be farther from the center of power, at lower population densities that can’t call on the center’s defenders.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:
        February 7, 2019 at 5:51 pm

        Something like this, an -inverted- dungeon:

        An ancient cataclysm drove Man/The civilized races/etc Into the depths of the earth millennia ago. No one can agree if it was invaders out of the sky, sowing the seeds of some alien biology with them, or wrathful gods turning their hands against their creation, an apocalyptic war between nations of man that unleashed weapons so terrible that they broke the world, or something far stranger. No reliable accounts of the surface have been heard in centuries (that the general public knows of), and even the upper tunnels are so hostile that expeditions upward often fail to return. And yet expeditions persist. There are -riches- up there. Ruins of ancient civilizations, riches of the ages, and of course strange and powerful artifacts left over from that same cataclysm. And of course, down here life goes on. The new nations expand their territory by tunnelling, by exploiting natural caverns, by linking together the deepest delvings of those earlier civilizations, and there are the usual politics, trade, intrigue, and even sometimes war…

    • MrApophenia says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:53 pm

      I like the idea, but my big concern is how unlikely you are to ever get to the payoff. Most of the D&D campaigns I’ve been in have run for a year or two tops – in 5E, we went from level 1 to, I want to say, 7? Maybe 8.

      That represented lots of individual adventures and modules played through as their own fairly complete story, with as much continuing stuff between them as we wanted. But with a megadungeon, you’re just scratching the surface when the group inevitably breaks up due to real life.

      On the other hand, for a group that really can be reasonably sure it will still be meeting over the long term, they seem like they could be a lot of fun.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:13 am

        Yeah, that’s the thing. The Greyhawk group was a rotating one, so A) it never broke up and B) had to contain an order of magnitude more enemies and treasure than a megadungeon designed to get a regular group of four PCs to a certain number of XP.

    • Skivverus says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:53 pm

      Depends on your players; empirically speaking, you can probably draw some parallels from which video games ended up successful in the “Diablo-clone” genre. The convention there seems to be “consistent theme is more important than verisimilitude”, but I can’t exactly claim a comprehensive or unbiased study of the literature, so to speak. (ETA: Nornagest is definitely thinking in the same vein here.)
      It works out as two levels of constraint relative to pure kitchen-sink dungeon-ing: you have larger areas with general themes, and then those areas have relatively specific sorts of layouts based on the themes. “Place where humanoids actually live, with bedrooms and stuff” is one kind of theme, but not necessarily the only one.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:17 am

        you have larger areas with general themes, and then those areas have relatively specific sorts of layouts based on the themes. “Place where humanoids actually live, with bedrooms and stuff” is one kind of theme, but not necessarily the only one.

        Yeah, I can imagine a location like that retaining verisimilitude. It could be a city built around a mine dug into a mountain with an ice cap and have an igloo area and a water area in addition to the normal theme, for instance.
        Another easy one is to have an undead area because the culture that built the dungeon believe in burying their dead within the settlement.

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 7, 2019 at 2:00 am

      The best early megadungeon (not very mega by today’s standards, or by the standards of Gygax’s own Greyhawk and so forth, but still pretty big) is The Caverns of Thracia. It’s got some versimilitude in the places that are inhabited by intelligent, “normal” creatures, but it’s also got less-inhabited areas that are full of weird monsters and the like.

      It’s not so big as to be unlikely for a group to reach the end, but it’s pretty big. It’s supposedly for lower-level parties, but I’m not sure I believe that (and early D&D tends to assume large parties – eg, The Island of Dread says it’s for level x-y, but in the introductory notes, it’s assuming a group with 6+ PCs – either larger groups used to be the norm, or people having multiple PCs was the norm, or both, because 4 is far likelier). I ran some of it, and it was pretty good.

    • Walter says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:29 am

      We played through the Emerald Spire megadungeon. I didn’t particularly see any advantages over ordinary campaigns that hop from dungeon to dungeon.

      • dndnrsn says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:04 am

        There’s something cool about having parts of the dungeon that become familiar – “oh, that’s where Ted died, and that’s where we ambushed those ogres…” and megadungeons usually emphasize exploration more than smaller, one-delve dungeons.

      • J Mann says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:23 am

        Agreed – I suspect the people in my campaign are going to want to do Mad Mage for levels 6 through 20. I’m game, but it seems to me that if you’re going to do a character’s entire career, it makes a better story to travel around having a world wide adventure and plot threads.

    • beleester says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:46 pm

      The Angry GM is working on a megadungeon and offered this trick for making environments look bigger: Collapsed passageways. You build just one or two bedrooms with actual encounters and loot, but add collapsed passageways leading out that give the impression that there were enough bedrooms for everyone originally.

      Also, not every “room” is going to be an “encounter space.” A 10×10 room is alright for a bedroom, but it can barely fit the entire party if you’re in combat. So you could tack a few of those onto any room, describe them as bedrooms or kitchens or whatever, and probably nobody’s going to care about them once you’ve established that they generally don’t have any loot.

      Also, a 1-20 megadungeon is probably not going to be all castle, all the time – after 20 levels it’ll start to feel like less of a castle and more of an arcology. You can have a few floors of realistic castle, and then you discover a room where the floor has caved in and given access to the caverns beneath, and then after a few floors of caves you discover a passage into the lava pits, etc.

      • Randy M says:
        February 8, 2019 at 7:17 am

        Those are good articles, though some get overly mathy (which you might appreciate if you are a devoted by the book 5E DM) and one shouldn’t expect the series to be completed, alas.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 8, 2019 at 3:00 pm

        The Angry GM is working on a megadungeon and offered this trick for making environments look bigger: Collapsed passageways. You build just one or two bedrooms with actual encounters and loot, but add collapsed passageways leading out that give the impression that there were enough bedrooms for everyone originally.

        Clever, but I’d want to build in enough bedrooms for the entire current sapient population.

        Also, not every “room” is going to be an “encounter space.” A 10×10 room is alright for a bedroom, but it can barely fit the entire party if you’re in combat. So you could tack a few of those onto any room, describe them as bedrooms or kitchens or whatever, and probably nobody’s going to care about them once you’ve established that they generally don’t have any loot.

        Yeah, now that’s more like it. 10×10 rooms can be where the humans/monsters sleep, but they’re small add-ons to the rooms large enough to fight encounters in.

        after 20 levels it’ll start to feel like less of a castle and more of an arcology. You can have a few floors of realistic castle, and then you discover a room where the floor has caved in and given access to the caverns beneath, and then after a few floors of caves you discover a passage into the lava pits, etc.

        Well yes. The archetypal Labyrinth, at Knossos, was 2 hectares and probably had fewer than 1000 residents. That’s not nearly enough by itself to feed a revolving cast of PCs up to 250,000 XP.

        Here’s how Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz did it with Castle Greyhawk:

        “The first level was a simple labyrinth of rooms and corridors.”
        “The second level had two unusual items, a nixie pool and a fountain of [endless] snakes.”
        “The third level was the literal dungeon.”
        “”The fourth was a level of crypts for undead.”

        … and below those rational levels, there was “a strange font of black fire and many gargoyles (fifth)”, a maze (sixth), a circular town of ogres (seventh), natural caves (8-10), “The eleventh level was the home of the most powerful wizard in the castle. He had balrogs as servants. The remainder of the level was populated by Martian white apes, except the sub-passage system underneath the corridors which was full of poisonous critters with no treasure.” Then below that there was originally “an inescapable chute to China”, later retconned and expanded when Gygax let Rob Kuntz DM into multiple levels below 11, most strikingly Level 13 with “Entrances to Asgard Melnibone & Dying Earth.”

  13. sandoratthezoo says:
    February 6, 2019 at 2:53 pm

    RPGs that aren’t D&D:

    Conversation here seems to go heavily to D&D in the case of roleplaying games. I thought I’d suggest some games that you folks might look into that cater to tastes other than those that D&D caters to. This isn’t because D&D is bad (it does a great job at what it does), but just because it’s not ideally targeted towards everyone.

    First suggestion: Eclipse Phase

    Eclipse Phase is a transhuman science-fiction roleplaying game. It’s set in the indeterminate future, after a runaway AI catastrophe kills about 98% of humanity (though only about 90% are irretrievably killed, the remainder surviving as backups) and renders Earth uninhabitable. It also has the virtue of being licensed with Creative Commons, meaning that you can legally download all of the game material. Here’s a useful index of game and its supplements: https://robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs/

    Eclipse Phase is a space-based game in which most people, certainly including PCs, have their mind states saved to implanted computer storage which can be reinstantiated in other bodies in a manner that is very definitely ripped right off from Altered Carbon. However, the game pushes further into transhuman themes than Altered Carbon, so the bodies that you might sleeve include things like robots, uplifted octopuses, and, you know, whatever other crazy shit that you can sell your group on.

    The game sets up a pretty evocative setting of a solar system divided between a traditional economy in the inner system and a post-scarcity economy in the outer system. This is not a very coherent setting (I’ve done considerable expansion of the setting to try to make the economics make sense), but it creates a plethora of different, interesting physical and social settings to have adventures in. You might have adventures set on the domed cities of Luna, the aerosats of Venus, fairly traditional space stations, hollowed out asteroids, a partially-terraformed Mars, or in the corona of the Sun.

    One thing I’ve found useful about Eclipse Phase is that it admits a fairly large possibility of player characters coming from limited or no information about the setting, which prevents some of the traditional problem of sci-fi RPGs where you need the players to digest hundreds of pages of setting information in order for them to function. I’ve done a few gambits, but the simplest is to have the players be old, experimental mind-scans that have recently been revived, with no knowledge of the last several decades (or even a century+) of the setting’s history, thus allowing them to learn what they need at the beginning of play and excusing any holes in their knowledge.

    Eclipse Phase (at least, the first edition) has a fairly old-school game system that isn’t, I think, great. It’s a percentile system, it models characters pretty traditionally, and its character generation process is a bit cumbersome. However, it won’t annoy people who are used to traditional RPG concepts the way that many modern story-games will, and it’s fun to page through the many, many, many lists of gadgets and morph accessories in a gear-porn/magic item kind of way.

    The game’s default conflict is that the PCs are agents of Firewall, fighting against exigent threats either left over from the AI singularity, or created by researchers with no brakes on, or coming from alien sources. This can manifest itself as pretty traditional RPG-style “go to a place and kill the things there,” or investigative gaming, or whatever. GMs who are willing to put some effort into fleshing out the setting can also pretty easily support a variety of other styles of gaming, including social/political, building/cooperative, and character-focused.

    • Nornagest says:
      February 6, 2019 at 2:58 pm

      Eclipse Phase has great writing and an excellent concept, but suffers from some thematic inconsistencies (it can’t decide whether it wants to be Ghost in the Shell or Altered Carbon or early Charles Stross, and those different takes on the transhuman future are less compatible than they look), and, more importantly, the underlying system’s so broken and mechanically fiddly that it’s almost unplayable. I’ve read the sourcebook several times, but only once been able to talk a group into trying it, and that went nowhere.

      • sandoratthezoo says:
        February 6, 2019 at 3:09 pm

        It does have thematic inconsistencies to be sure. But so does almost every successful RPG.

        The underlying system can be pretty successfully reduced to, “Here’s a character sheet, roll under the percentages on the character sheet; there’s a pretty traditional initiative and damage and dodge system for combat, too.” Creating a character is fiddly and broken, but you don’t need to toss players in on the deep end there.

        (Or you can do what I do and play the game systemless, but that is presumably the cup of tea of only a few percent of the people here.)

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:57 am

        I agree with Norn about the system, and “lol Earth was destroyed” SF settings leave me cold. Apparently our Solar system is so boring that the only way to make the rest of it interesting is to destroy Earth.
        I’m much more interested in a setting like Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (GIT’S SACK if you’re nasty).

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      February 6, 2019 at 3:24 pm

      I liked reading Eclipse Phase but I never even tried to get a group together. People are sometimes willing to put in the effort to learn the fiddly rules of D&D because it’s ubiquitous, but asking people to learn a fiddly niche RPG is a lot harder.

      I’ve had good experiences with various “Powered by the Apocalypse” games for that reason. The games are simple to learn, require essentially zero prep-time from either the players or the GM, and support improvisation. It’s trivial for me to put a group together for Monsterhearts or Dungeon World, even among non-gamers. They’re not incredibly deep games but they’re good beer and pretzels fun.

      • sandoratthezoo says:
        February 6, 2019 at 4:54 pm

        I was going to do PbtA games next Open Thread. 🙂

        In general, it’s going to be easier to sell a group on a new game if they’re a comfortable group who are largely friendly, and if they have at least some experience with two or more different games. But it’s not actually super hard for people who’ve learned one RPG system to learn another, particularly if someone in the group is willing to jump in and do the heavy lifting wherever the system gets most complex. There are some exceptions here — very non-traditional games and very, very complex games — but a lot of the time, if you can get over any generally conservative sentiment, it’s not actually very difficult for people to try out a new game.

        • RDNinja says:
          February 7, 2019 at 6:31 am

          I managed to get some neighbors/church friends to play a Warrior, Rogue, & Mage game for a while. I had to tweak the rules, because I was just running them through the plot of Skyrim, but it’s a very stripped-down system that better than D&D for new players.

    • HaraldN says:
      February 6, 2019 at 11:35 pm

      My RPG group tried Eclipse phase, found it to be pretty bad. The GM in particular found it horrible to run, as every character typically has at least 3 forms of extrahuman senses (such as radar, thermal vision, etc).

      I’ll recommend Deadlands (2nd edition). It takes place in alternate history wild west, where the civil war never ended, and the native americans are still independent nations. The point of divergene is the existence of some magic, including nature spirits, magic infused coal, devils, etc. It uses a lot of props (poker chips, playing cards) which make for great mechanics in general and also create the proper atmosphere. The only drawback is that roleplaying it can require a decent amount of effort in learning the setting and historical limitations.

      • sandoratthezoo says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:30 am

        There’s a big temptation, when you get the Eclipse Phase book and engage with the character generation system as written, to get really tricked out morphs. And when you do that, additional seems are cheap and high value.

        But note that that’s not the only way to play the game. Much of the source material features people in bodies that they do not entirely choose, and trying to make the best of a suboptimal situation. For beginners, an approach of, “you wake up in a resleeving facility, this is what you are today” had a lot of advantages.

        If you do go with the player choice approach, you can share some of the burden with the players. Make it the player’s obligation to ask, “what do I see on terahertz right now?”

        Deadlands is lots of fun! The mechanics are clunky but charming. I recommend simplifying it in a few ways. If they still have “trade XP to avoid damage,” I suggest dropping that stuff.

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 7, 2019 at 1:55 am

      The historical #2 game is probably Call of Cthulhu, and it’s probably my favourite RPG, so I’ll recommend that. It’s got some excellent published stuff (not as much as is commonly thought, but Masks of Nyarlathotep is considered the best RPG campaign for a reason, and almost everything Pagan Publishing did is great). It’s… You know the drill. Fight unspeakable monstrosities and go insane and/or die. It’s a lot more sensitive to good adventure design than a lot of games – in D&D, a fairly uninspired and hacky dungeon can still be fun; CoC is heavily investigative, and an investigative scenario that is not put together well will either fizzle or turn into a railroad. However, a good investigative scenario is really fun.

      The new Delta Green is basically an offshoot, and since it’s basically the same people as did the original DG sourcebooks for CoC at Pagan Publishing, it is by default good. It cleans up the CoC rules system (gets rid of the awful resistance table, for example), speeds up character creation, and quantifies your character’s personal relationships and how they are damaged by the stress of fighting the unknown horrors from beyond space and time or whatever. CoC often had the fluff of “you sacrifice your wellbeing to protect people from things you can’t tell them about” but without quantified rules, CoC easily turns into globetrotting adventurers throwing dynamite from zeppelins. DG’s rules force your character to have families and friends – and then they all peel away because you keep getting so drunk you talk about “the voices.”

      • Deiseach says:
        February 10, 2019 at 10:53 am

        DG’s rules force your character to have families and friends

        Okay, I have to stop you right there and complain about the fantastic unrealism of that. Families and friends in Lovecraft’s universe? Unless it’s an elderly uncle whom you never heard of contacting you out of the blue before he is hideously murdered, or a college friend whom you lost touch with contacting you out of the blue before he is hideously murdered, or a message summoning you back to an ancestral small town your parents had fled and steadfastly refused ever to tell you anything about, where the awful revelation of your hideous unnatural ancestry is revealed in the creeping degeneration of your physical and mental faculties, then this is just totally unbelieveable and immediately ruins any immersion in the game!

        Though to be fair, allowances can be made for your wife and children fleeing from the family home as the usurping intelligence which has possessed your body fails, despite its best efforts, to hide its presence, or the spirit of your domineering wife – which turns out to be, in fact, the spirit of her domineering father which first possessed her body and now is trying to possess yours in order to sequentially achieve immortality – drives your spirit into her rotting corpse which then collapses on the doorstep of one of those long-lost college friends.

        But investigators having normal, ordinary, everyday relationships like average people? I’m sorry, this is just too much to ask me to accept! 🙂

        • dndnrsn says:
          February 10, 2019 at 1:51 pm

          This is actually one of the recurring problems of RPGs in a Lovecraftian setting: Lovecraft wrote primarily about single individuals, but RPGs happen in a group. Similarly, while Lovecraft has some stories where the good guys win, the standard Lovecraft ending won’t be super fun for an RPG.

        • Plumber says:
          February 10, 2019 at 5:32 pm

          “…investigators having normal, ordinary, everyday relationships like average people? I’m sorry, this is just too much to ask me to accept!”

          Okay, I nominate that as comment of the week and DeiDeisearch’s my favorite commenter of all time!

    • Walter says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:28 am

      I have been playing diceless games for the past couple of years. I recommend Nobilis and Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (an Amber expy).

      • sandoratthezoo says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:32 am

        I’ve never played LoG&S, but Amber diceless is my favorite game, and I’m a huge advocate of it.

    • broblawsky says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:51 am

      A friend of mine ran Eclipse Phase using a conversion of One Role Engine (as in Reign and Wild Talents) that worked very well for action-y stuff.

    • bean says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:40 am

      If you’re going to learn a fiddly, complex system that isn’t D&D, make it GUPRS. Period. Then you only have to learn one fiddly, mechanics-heavy system and you can play any character concept in any setting.
      Seriously, I’ve never seen a system with anything like the same versatility. Yes, there are problems, but the mechanics aren’t as bad as they’re reputed to be (except for GURPS Vehicles, which is horrifying if you do it by hand) and you can play any reasonable character concept with 3-4 sourcebooks. It even makes grappling fairly straightforward.

  14. Nicholas Weininger says:
    February 6, 2019 at 5:46 pm

    I think your identification of one of the central problems is correct, but in terms of lessons, would just add it to the list of reasons why fundamental institutional rules changes should not be decided by a single bare-majority vote, whether that be a referendum or a vote of the legislature. Supermajority requirements FTW.

    • cassander says:
      February 6, 2019 at 5:52 pm

      Having supermajority requirements just prejudices the status quo. Far better to make it easy to pass things and then easy to undo them, that makes it difficult to impose upon minorities, but without the logrolling and stasis that supermajorities lead to.

      • Joseph Greenwood says:
        February 6, 2019 at 7:27 pm

        If things are easy to pass and revoke then stability and thus economic and social institutions suffer. If things are easy to pass and even easier to revoke wouldn’t that prejudice in favor of the status quo even more?

        I’ve gradually come around to the position that things should be biased in favor of the status quo. “The way things are” is certainly not the best they could be, but it is substantially better than most of the alternatives. Relevant: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/change-is-bad/

        • cassander says:
          February 6, 2019 at 7:55 pm

          Making it easy to both start and stop things prejudices leaving people alone, which, on the whole, strikes me as a good baseline. And since change in inevitable, it’s better to have a system that can roll with it than one that locks you into a particular direction, even if you’re headed for a cliff.

      • John Schilling says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:46 am

        Far better to make it easy to pass things and then easy to undo them

        Some things are intrinsically hard to undo, or redo, and negotiating complex multiparty federal unions is high on that list.

      • Nicholas Weininger says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:24 pm

        The problems with this include:

        1. there are high social costs to hysteresis and the resultant regime uncertainty

        2. it is not clear whether 52% in a single vote actually constitutes a majority of popular sentiment at all; elections, like polls, have margins of error.

        • suntzuanime says:
          February 7, 2019 at 7:31 pm

          I think when you have tens of millions of votes, statistical error in the whole percents is not something you need to be worried about.

        • Nicholas Weininger says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:06 pm

          @suntzuanime

          I’m not talking about vote counting error; I believe vote totals are usually correct to within 0.1%, sure. What I mean is that the vote totals recorded on any given election day are a noisy representation of “actual public sentiment” due to the many factors that influence turnout (vagaries of voting rules, disparities in who can take off time to vote, disparities in who ends up feeling like voting rather than staying home, weather on election day, etc etc) and that that noise is of much higher magnitude.

        • suntzuanime says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:23 pm

          That’s not what people mean when they talk about a poll’s “margin of error”, though. Even if a candidate is leading in the polls beyond the margin of error, they can be “actually” behind due to any of those biasing factors.

    • Andy Bethune says:
      February 6, 2019 at 7:31 pm

      As the UK didn’t have a referendum to join the UK, I don’t see a fundamental reason why leaving it should take a supermajority.

      • Evan Þ says:
        February 6, 2019 at 11:26 pm

        I agree; that’s a fair argument for another Scottish independence referendum. 😛

        • The Nybbler says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:13 am

          Scotland was taken by right of conquest. They want out, they’ll have to bring out the claymores again.

        • Evan Þ says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:26 am

          When was this conquest – 1715 or 1745, I’m guessing, since it definitely wasn’t 1603?

        • Plumber says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:33 am

          The Nybbler

          “Scotland was taken by right of conquest. They want out, they’ll have to bring out the claymores again”

          I thought that England and Wales were taken by Scotland as Elizabeth the first was childless and King James the sixth was the closest heir?

      • Lambert says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:00 am

        1975 Referendum?

        • Evan Þ says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:33 am

          One can mount a really good argument that the European Economic Community as of 1975 is different from the current European Union.

        • Lambert says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:42 am

          One can, but one can also argue that not signing the Maasricht Treaty would be just as large a departure from the pre-EU status quo as signing it.

    • Joseph Greenwood says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:44 am

      If you are going to make it easy to pass and revoke laws, I think it is at least important that you have an almost untouchable constitution and bill of rights lying underneath that sets the terms of the political conflict and makes sure that when the Demopublicans win they cannot disbar all Republicrats from running for office (or just get rid of elections) and make their words illegal. This does mean you might get some oddities like the second amendment which a lot of people would really like to revoke but they simply cannot, but I think that is an acceptable cost to me.

    • Chalid says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:11 am

      An issue which comes up all the time recently is that the American system makes iterative improvement difficult. Ideally, if you wanted to make some significant change, you’d make a small change in the direction you want, then assess the impacts, then iterate. But since the two parties won’t cooperate and each party only gets a chance to make changes once a decade or so, each party ends up implementing big sweeping untested changes instead.

      • Joseph Greenwood says:
        February 7, 2019 at 5:30 am

        That is a good point which I had not thought about. Thank you for bringing it up.

      • EchoChaos says:
        February 7, 2019 at 5:39 am

        Is this true? Does America have more sweeping change than other countries?

        My view is that the American system is tremendously status-quo biased, true, but that sweeping change is even more common in European countries.

        For example, I googled “sweeping changes” and came up with this article about France.

        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/22/macron-takes-page-from-trump-change-france-labour-laws

        Obamacare, to use a recent major change in American law, was less sweeping than it would have been in a purely parliamentary system (compare it to the NHS which was enacted by a purely parliamentary system).

    • Plumber says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:06 am

      @Atlas

      “…..They then get judged by voters on a weird policy mish-mash status quo that is substantially the result of the opposition party’s hold on veto points (but most voters don’t understand that.)…”

      Congress seems to have done tax cuts, and the end of “welfare as we know it” fine, and the courts seem to have ‘social issue’ changes down, and the legislative change I most support in my lifetime (the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare) was pretty hard fought but Pelosi got it done, so some changes are made.

      • cassander says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:42 am

        taxes have been pretty much the same since the korean war. Changes in the overall level have been affected more by changing economic conditions than legislative changes.

  15. Well... says:
    February 6, 2019 at 6:15 pm

    I think a lot of people here will like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ruC5A9EzzE

    Math fun. (I’m not a math person but I liked it.)

  16. Clutzy says:
    February 6, 2019 at 6:25 pm

    The central problem of referendums is actually shown in the case of California as well: They often only happen when there is a great disconnect between the people and their representatives.

    Proposition 8 in California is similar. It got 52% of the votes, but would have probably only gotten about 20% of legislators to vote for it. Then the California AG refused to defend it in court. The same is true of Brexit. Only 20% or so of MPs favored it, and now there is no MP willing to skillfully negotiate Brexit because none of them understand what it even is. Or why it was needed.

    • EchoChaos says:
      February 6, 2019 at 8:54 pm

      Which is why I am so in favor of democratic (small d) systems. Because am very conservative and the masses tend to favor conservative things while the elites tend to be more idealistic and favor changing the system “for the better”.

      • Plumber says:
        February 6, 2019 at 10:39 pm

        @EchoChaos

        “….the masses tend to favor conservative things…”

        It depends on what you mean by “conservative”.

        I’m going to quote at length from The New York Times: "...In reality, the American public is closer to being “socially conservative and economically liberal” than the reverse.

        On the socially conservative part: More than half of Americans say they pray daily. About 53 percent say abortion should be legal either “only in a few circumstances” or never. Almost 70 percent say illegal immigration is a “very big” or “moderately big” problem. On some of these subjects, the answers can depend on the precise phrasing of poll questions. But you have to twist the data pretty hard to create a portrait of a secular, liberal majority on most social issues.

        Economic policy is very different. Large majorities of Americans oppose cuts to Medicare and Social Security and favor expanded Medicaid. They favor higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. They favor a higher minimum wage and more aggressive government action to create jobs..." The “fiscal conservative/social liberal” “centrist” “moderates” are a media invention based on dominant views of the ‘upper middle class’ (those with higher incomes and college diplomas) which is not the majority of eligible voters.

        Social conservatism combined with ‘social democrat’ economic views is called “Populism” for a reason.

        A more (small d) democratically run United States would both spend more on social programs (especially for the elderly) and be less ‘progressive’.

        I vote for the Democratic Party candidates, but I can’t help but notice that in terms of law it is Democrats social agenda, not the stated economic agenda, that has been ascendant in my lifetime, and as for the Republican agenda? 

        Lots of tax cuts but Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land.

        If I could get a higher minimum wage and the return of the W.P.A. and in return “social issues” that were determined by judicial fiat instead of plebiscite would be free for voters to decide, I wouldn’t think twice, I’d make that trade, but I’m not “Grey Tribe” and I’m certainly not a ‘liberal-atarian’ like our host, I want the low poverty rates and high wages of 1973 and the private sector union density of 1954, and I care far more about how de-industrialisation destroying inner-cities in the ’70’s and ’80’s and then destroying rural America in the 21st century than I care about niche ‘social progress’.

        In the last 50 years it hasn’t been “The Left” nor “The Right” winning, but I realize now there has indeed been a ‘culture war’ – and the winners have been the so called “moderates”, that is professional class values, and the wealthy, and the losers have been majoritarian rule and democracy.

        • brad says:
          February 7, 2019 at 3:44 am

          Where would you find unemployed people to work in a new WPA?

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 7, 2019 at 4:55 am

          I mean conservative in the sense of “not changing much”, actually.

          But as I’ve said before, you and I are on the same page on this issue, despite being in different political parties (I view the social part as more important than the fiscal, so I am a Republican).

          My view is that the elites are socially liberal and fiscally conservative, so when the Democrats get in power there is vigor in pushing the socially liberal part of the platform and little enthusiasm for pushing the fiscally liberal part.

          Likewise, when the Republicans get in power there is tremendous enthusiasm for the fiscally conservative part, and relatively little for the socially conservative, despite appeals to the base in both cases.

          Look at Donald Trump, who is by far the most appealing figure to my politics in my lifetime. He compromised with his party’s establishment to pass a tax cut in return for immigration reform and a wall. And the party’s establishment (specifically Paul Ryan) screwed him.

        • Plumber says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:32 am

          @Brad,
          Judging by the Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate there’s still people without jobs who’d I wager would want a job with dignity.
          The W.P.A. was an option, there was already “relief”, the program was for the psychological value of work, in the words of it’s director Harry Hopkins: ”Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both body and spirit“.

          @EchoChaos,
          Trump has been underwhelming in fulfilling his populist promises. I’d be curious to see what someone competent who made those promises would’ve achieved, as for the tensions between both the Democratic and Republican parties “bases” and “elites” I think your essentially correct, and neither base is getting what it wants, but both parties donor classes agendas seem to be doing quite well.

        • Joseph Greenwood says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:34 am

          EchoChaos: to clarify, when you say “fiscally conservative” do you mean “lower taxes” or “less government spending”? Because to my understanding, the Republican bill managed the former but did not touch the latter.

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:45 am

          @Plumber

          I agree with that. Trump was a political neophyte and believed the establishment when they said “cut taxes and we’ll give you your stuff”. They lied, as they always do.

          @Joseph Greenwood

          Both. Republicans made more progress on the tax cuts than the spending cuts though, for the same reason as above.

        • ana53294 says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:58 am

          Why are these things populism?

          • A constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress
          • A ban on federal employees lobbying the government for five years
          • A ban on members of Congress lobbying for five years
          • Tighter rules about what constitutes a lobbyist, instead of letting people call themselves consultants
          • Campaign finance reform limiting what foreign companies can raise for American political candidates
          • A ban on senior government officials lobbying for foreign governments

          Negotiating drug prices is not “populist” it is sensible. Not doing it when you can pay much less is just plain stupid.

          Fixing crumbling infrastructure is also something that has to be done. What is the alternative, to let it fall?

          I always thought “populism” is bread and circus. But if populism means reducing corruption, having good infrastructure and not paying outrageous drug prices, then I am proud to announce I have become populist!

        • brad says:
          February 7, 2019 at 4:17 pm

          @Plumber

          Judging by the Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate there’s still people without jobs who’d I wager would want a job with dignity.

          Reveled preferences say that there aren’t a lot of people without jobs who want one. I’m not sure why you think you know better the secret desires of their hearts than what their actions are telling us.

        • RalMirrorAd says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:11 am

          I would argue the WPA does exist… sort of… in the form of the US military. Note that the MIC did not exist [not really] when the new deal was started.

          @Brad; The growth of the gig economy, part time work, contract work, etc, plus the fact that long periods of low unemployment haven’t resulted in much inflation/job growth suggests to me there’s still a lot of hidden slack in the economy. Maybe I’m wrong though.

        • bean says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:43 am

          I would argue the WPA does exist… sort of… in the form of the US military. Note that the MIC did not exist [not really] when the new deal was started.

          I’m not sure either side is even as even your hedged statement suggests. The military has high standards these days. They have to. Modern warfare is really complicated. It may be the best path to a steady job if you’re young and in reasonably good health, but there’s a nonzero risk of getting shot at, and there are also a lot of drawbacks. Not to mention that it doesn’t help if you’re outside the age limits or have certain health problems.

          And the lack of a military-industrial complex in the early 30s can be overstated. Naval construction had been big business for at least half a century, although the treaties put a big dent in it. The big difference was that a lot of the capacity was directly government-owned, instead of being in private hands. During and after the war, other types of procurement moved from “two men in a shed” to “big business”, too, and for good reason. And quite a few ships were paid for out of NIRA funds, including at least two carriers. (I don’t have a complete list to hand, and I don’t think any of my books have one. Maybe this is something I need to rectify…)

    • Plumber says:
      February 6, 2019 at 10:50 pm

      The principle of the California referendum system is great, in practice interests with deep pockets pay for to collect the signatures to qualify for the ballot, and they are way too many ballot measures combined with extremely annoying radio advertisements to vote for those measures.

  17. wollywoo says:
    February 6, 2019 at 6:56 pm

    Somebody steelman for me the pro-Maduro position. (I don’t mean “US should not meddle in Venezuela” etc. I mean “Maduro is a better leader then Guaido.”)

    • LadyJane says:
      February 6, 2019 at 8:07 pm

      Honestly, the most common pro-Maduro argument I’ve heard basically boils down to “Maduro is a socialist and socialism is good,” with a side of “Maduro opposes the U.S. and the U.S. is bad.” And the claims that Juan Guaido is a far-right authoritarian seem completely baseless; he’s a centrist social democrat who’s spent most of his career fighting for civil liberties. The far-right accusation seems to be centered solely around the fact that he’s allied himself with Trump and Bolsonaro, but that’s just how foreign entanglements work; I have no doubt that he would’ve made the same deals with the U.S. and Brazil if center-left politicians had gotten elected to the American and Brazilian Presidencies.

      Given all that, the best steelman I can think of would be an appeal to democracy. Maduro won the election, and while he might not have won it fair and square, we don’t know that for sure. The National Assembly didn’t have sufficient proof that the election was rigged before they acted to remove Maduro and appoint Guaido in his place; in doing so, they subverted the democratic will of the people. Furthermore, the influence of foreign actors calls the motives and legitimacy of the National Assembly’s actions into question.

      I don’t agree with it, but I feel like it’s a perfectly valid argument to make.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:38 am

      One could make a hybrid argument of ‘Maduro is a better leader’ and ‘US should not meddle in Venezuela’ –>

      Even if regime change improved things for Venezuela, the people who pine for the kind of jurisprudence characteristic of Chavez/Maduro can always point to the overt interference of the united states and say that things only went south because the US engaged in some set of actions designed to produce that effect. I doubt it explains most of the problems as countries like Iran are constantly under economic pressure from the United States. — Eventually the public will re-elect another Maduro equivalent and the cycle will repeat itself, as bad as before. Problems can always be blamed on US interference and the people who make these claims will always have the evidence provided for them obligingly by American coupsters.

      But yeah I seldom see people defend specific policy actions of Maduro, the party line is more that Chavez did nothing wrong and that present problems are the result of outside actors.

    • Walter says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:24 am

      If you like.

      The most crucial fact of Venezuela is that Maduro is already in power. If anyone else wants to take his power they have to defeat him and the armies of the nation, which will entail deaths on the order of thousands to tens of thousands, and the transformation of Venezuela into a Syria-esque hellscape.

      Maduro’s supporters have seen Libya, have seen the mercy of the regime changers. They know the fate that awaits them if Guaido takes power. They have no incentive to back down. You should assume that they will fight.

      Remember that when these deceivers tell you to rise up and start a war. You should model them as longing for slaughter, craving the deaths of the people, because from a consequentialist perspective, that’s exactly what they are displaying. They are willing to throw the dice with the lives of others so long as they can push aside the leader that they hate and replace him with a puppet. Whatever your position on the current dispute, you need to understand that the people who live in a foreign country and wish war upon you are enemies.

      You will notice that they, for the most part, live beneath a leader that they don’t approve of. Yet they don’t seem inclined to launch an uprising and rush the leader of the House into power. That course of action is fine for someone else, but in their own lives they seem oddly content to click their tongues from their gated communities and wait for another election.

      If you value human life, you must oppose war. Supporting Maduro is a silent virtue, a hard one. The lives you save will go unnoticed, the excesses of the socialists will grow ever worse. The innocents who grow up in a nightmare economy will curse their fates, but they will live to do so, in numbers that a civil war would not allow.

      I don’t envy you this position. The lot of the collaborator is a vile one. But the moral calculus is clear. Supporting Maduro will not cause a war. Supporting Guaido will.

      • ilikekittycat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:36 am

        And if Guaido goes along with us, maybe succeeds for a few years on some coincidental oil price surge, but then comes to a crunch situation where Venezuelan interests don’t line up with the rich nations’ extraction industries? Does anyone think he won’t immediately be converted into yet another villain in the minds of every mainstream Western politician and pundit? Maybe a few crusty academics will point out how he was sold as a hero when he was against Maduro, but I can already see the mainstream Western media when times get hard for Guaido: “What is it about superstitious Latin American culture that keeps them addicted to Chavismo strongmen no matter how the political tides change?” Short of the 1000000:1 odds a long-lost Raul Kennedy or Jorge Koch comes out of the jungle and takes power, no one who could potentially end up in charge is gonna have enough connections to not be immediately disposable to the Washington elites (at no reputation loss or public liability to them)

        The steelman for Maduro’s rule over Guaido’s potential is that value-over-replacement-player is not a relevant factor for the forseeable future of the Venezuelan presidency. The luck of the invisible hand, and the luck of whether the political situation in the rich countries gives them room to feel concillatory during your administration is what it comes down to. No matter how many times you want to shuffle the deck, you don’t arrive at socialist utopia or neoliberal economic revitalization, you just end up with another mess, the same pie being cut smaller, the flood waters still rising.

    • John Schilling says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:43 am

      I’m not nearly good enough to steelman this one, so I’ll leave it to the pros.

      “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. ”

      Granted, Venezuela’s government is not as long established today as was the British Empire in 1776, but the principle still remains. Maduro is the elected president, which gives him a measure of legitimacy no one else has. It is possible the election was fraudulent but that isn’t obvious or proven and if it was fraudulent it isn’t obvious or proven that Guaido should be the president either. Maduro commands the army, the police and civil service are also loyal to him, and you really don’t want there to be any uncertainty over who commands the army.

      So if someone is going to say that the person we all agreed was Venezuela’s legitimate ruler a month ago, they need to come up with a more compelling argument than “he’s obviously incompetent, lots of people hate him, and some of them are saying there was electoral fraud”. Maybe find some guy to write up a specific list of grievances and lay out the justification for an extralegal change of government. Then consider carefully whether you want to go forward with it, because Maduro still commands the army so the next step isn’t “we’ve come to an agreement so Maduro has to step down now”. it’s fighting a war that Maduro might still win.

      TL,DR: Civil wars really suck, so the bar for extralegal regime change should be set correspondingly high.

    • broblawsky says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:46 am

      In addition to what everyone else has said: Venezuela has no real industry other than oil, and the oil industry is screwed with or without Maduro. It might be worse without Maduro, since de-nationalizing local assets of foreign companies (something the US is likely to insist on) could further disrupt production. Nationalization is the only thing keeping PDVSA afloat.

      (Note: this is a steelman position, not something I actually believe)

    • wollywoo says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:48 pm

      Thanks for the discussion. Most of the arguments so far have been that Maduro is already in power, and it will take serious bloodshed to remove him from power, and it’s not worth it. That’s a reasonable position. But I was trying to avoid the question of violence. The position I want to steelman is the position of the people waving flags at pro-Maduro rallies, not the position that he’s an asshole but that he should remain in power because it’s too difficult to remove him.

      • Enkidum says:
        February 9, 2019 at 10:46 am

        I want to push back against what you think you want, because I think it’s the wrong thing to want.

        I am very, very opposed to Trump, and have spent my entire life opposing the principles he represents (this is not meant to cast myself as some sort of hardcore activist, more of a whiny white middle-class person).

        I have heard numerous people advocating regime change in the United States at various points in my life. I oppose them, without exception. This isn’t because it’s “difficult”. It’s because it’s wrong. It’s the wrong goal to have. Period.

        I want Trump gone (I also wanted Bushes Jr and Sr gone, and Reagan gone, and to be honest I wasn’t a huge fan of Clinton or Obama). But the way the United States and most other Western countries has institutionalized shifts of power is fundamentally better than any alternative. And every time the US has tried to do what it is currently trying to do in Venezuala, it has been an unmitigated disaster for the people of that country. No exceptions that I’m aware of.

  18. The Pachyderminator says:
    February 6, 2019 at 8:38 pm

    Asking for a recommendation for an image viewer/slideshow generator.

    I have a collection of over 600 desktop backgrounds, which change daily on auto-shuffle. (In practice, they change more often than that, because scheduling a task to take place once a day is apparently too difficult for Windows. But that’s another issue.) I also sometimes like to play them in a slideshow on my TV, which can be nice to have in the background while playing music or while people are hanging around the living room. I’ve been using FastStone Image Viewer for this purpose, which has a nice slideshow mode.

    However, the images are of various types (classical art, sci-fi, photos) and various themes. Some contain nudity, some contain violence, some are religious, etc. Depending on the nature of the company and the occasion, I might want to exclude images of certain types, or include only certain types. FastStone doesn’t offer an easy way to do this. I could sort the images into subfolders, and simply turn the “Auto-play across folders” option on or off, but there are many overlapping categories, so that’s not a general solution. There’s a “Build slideshow” feature, but it creates huge .exe files which contain full copies of every picture, and which would have to be rebuilt manually every time I add more pictures to the library.

    The best way to do it would probably be by using the JPEG metadata tags, but if a program needs to have its own database, I’ll accept that too, as long as it doesn’t need to store multiple copies of the image files. A flexible command line/scripting interface and dual monitor support would be nice additional features.

    I don’t know of an image viewer with these features, and Googling hasn’t gotten me anywhere. And yet I can’t believe that I’m the first person who’s wanted to do this.

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:42 am

      If you can find an old copy, iView Media Pro was good at this. iView files were catalogs of images, entirely divorced from the location of the photos on your file system. You could have a thousand photos in a thousand different folders and then you arrange them in whatever way you want in the catalog. And then make another catalog where you arrange the photos in a different way. And yes you could do slideshows with transitions and timing and whatnot.

      However, IMP was bought by Phase One and integrated into their Capture One pro image software, which is probably too pricey for you. Today I organize my photos in Adobe Lightroom or Bridge.

      Could you try PowerPoint?

    • liate says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:45 am

      Is there any way to interact with windows’s tagging in a filesystem-oriented way? If you were on linux (and maybe OS X?), I’d advise TMSU, which is a program that lets you tag files and has a feature to make a virtual filesystem based on the tags, but the existing windows version doesn’t have the virtual filesystem feature. I know that windows does have tagging features in general, but I’ve not found any way to interact with them other than desktop search.

    • chrisminor0008 says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:37 am

      Dude, you are putting entirely too much effort into your computer wallpapers. Just put a static safe for work image on there and be done with it. It doesn’t tell the world how awesome you are.

      • The Pachyderminator says:
        February 7, 2019 at 10:17 am

        The wallpaper isn’t the point. Even if I had a static desktop background, I would still like decorative slideshows.

    • Douglas Knight says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:14 am

      600 images is not very much. Just duplicate them in multiple folders.

  19. suntzuanime says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:03 pm

    I’d recommend Antony and Cleopatra as a good “middling” choice of play except that it’s a sequel so you kind of need to see Julius Caesar first, which might not be hipster enough for you. You could watch Coriolanus if you don’t mind taking the Roman plays in chronological order rather than broadcast order.

    At the very least Julius Caesar needs to be on your list, it’s a hell of a play.

  20. angmod says:
    February 6, 2019 at 10:40 pm

    King Lear and Macbeth are my favorite Shakespeare plays, and I’d encourage you to go after Lear post haste. Hamlet is worth it, too, though it takes a number of readings and views to really enter into. I would also encourage you to reconsider your position on the comedies. Perhaps it is simply my personal tastes, but I have found some of them incredible. Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night in particular are very much worth your while, and I would place them right beneath the tragedies I mentioned. I’d also say that both Shakespeare and Dante give the lie to the notion that tragedies age better than comedies, though if they are merely exceptions to the rule then they should nevertheless be widely read as exceptional.

    Of the histories, Julius Caesar is worth the effort, as are Henry V and Richard III. It’s useful to get the whole of the Henriad, but both parts of Henry IV have significant weaknesses. I’d watch The Hollow Crown for context and read them only if you’re intrigued. I’m particularly fond of Richard II, but that opinion is considered unorthodox, so take it with a grain of salt.

    • angmod says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:43 pm

      I would argue that the big-name adaptations of Much Ado about Nothing that have been made in recent years (to some critical acclaim) at least provide counter-examples that need to be taken into consideration. And while it is certainly true that Dante’s Inferno is the part of the the Comedy that is more widely read in undergraduate circles, I don’t think that’s the best example of its importance. So perhaps we disagree about ways of defining significance as we consider the works of these authors that continue to matter in contemporary culture, and it would be worth exploring where exactly those differences lie.

      I understand the distinction you draw here between Dante’s “comedy” and Shakespeare’s, but I think they are fundamentally comedies of the same form. Even Inferno is ultimately a comedy when you get down to the bottom of Cocytus and find Satan trapped there utterly feckless. Certainly I’ll grant that many read the poem with an emphasis on the tragic elements, but I would like to make the argument that such is a mis-reading and (I hope) not the predominant reading.

      Probably there’s enough play in our terms that there’s some amount of speaking past one another going on here. I’m mostly interested in arguing no more than that Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night are worth reading (and viewing, if possible), even if ultimately they are not quite equal to the best of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

      • Nornagest says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:53 pm

        I submit that the best label for the Inferno is not “tragedy”, not “comedy”, but “revenge fic”.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 8, 2019 at 4:51 am

      Even in the Inferno, when we get to the Eighth Circle and the fifth division of that, we get the slapstick comedy of the popular mediaeval imagery of devils with the Malebranche (the Wikipedia article is short and a bit po-faced about them, leaving out the farting and fighting).

  21. Levantine says:
    February 7, 2019 at 1:34 am

    In the previous OP there was a recommendation of “Is There Anything Good about Men” by Roy Baumeister (the cognitive psychologist). I followed it, thank you very much, and in the book, p. 242:

    The marriage institution in Western culture was developed during earlier eras, when life expectancies were considerably shorter. Most marriages lasted fifteen to twenty years, a long time to be sure, but nothing like what is possible today.

    … Wait a minute. Those life expectancies were considerably shorter at birth, while at marrying age like fifteen-to-twenty they were much less short than, or even practically the same as those in modern industrialized societies, … depending on the particular society and time period.

    And this blows out of the water much of the argument that Baumeister is making.

    • Radu Floricica says:
      February 7, 2019 at 2:04 am

      Nah, I think his numbers are pretty spot on. For one thing, life expectation in agricultural societies was less than hunter gatherers. Not proper research, but a quick google gives this:

      However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.

      Also in some societies marriage started later. IANAH, but I’m reasonably sure at least in urban central Europe marriage ages of over 30 for both sexes were not uncommon.

      It’s been a while since I read the book, but I remember it being pretty well thought out – it’s Baumeister’s usual style. Not like him to make stupid mistakes, or to base the whole thesis of the book on one fact.

    • JPNunez says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:49 am

      Women dying during childbearing could help the argument, but it seems the effect is not as drastic with some exceptions.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:35 am

      I think he might be wrong about life expectancies in one way but right in another, since if we take maternal mortality into account, then men could be left widowers with a young family (depending on whether or not the child survived or died with the mother) and then would often remarry to have a mother to raise the children, maybe even a member of the late wife’s family – this seems to have been common enough that the vexed question of “marriage with deceased wife’s sister” was joked about in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” and the act legalising it was finally passed in 1907. If there were large age gaps between husband and wife, an older husband might die first leaving a still-marriageable widow behind.

      EDIT: There also seems to have been an expectation (at least during the Victorian era) that men would remarry, and fairly soon as well; while it was acceptable for women to remain in mourning or as widows, devoted to the memory of their husbands (see Queen Victoria mouring Albert for forty years), men were expected to mourn less deeply and not to be as overcome by grief as women:

      This chapter discusses the emotional responses and bereavement of Victorian men when faced with the death of their wife. In this chapter the differences of the coping mechanism of widows and widowers are discussed briefly wherein men are considered to adjust psychologically and socially faster than the women but individually, they appeared to feel a sense of grief for longer than women. In the chapter, the discussion also centres on the different coping methods of the widowers in terms of remarriage, professional consolation, alcoholism, and controlled expression of grief due to the emerging concept of masculinity wherein controlled emotions were hailed as ideal. Four cases of Victorian widowers are presented in this chapter to illustrate the experience of widowhood in men. These case studies illustrate the gender differences in coping with death during the Victorian period. Men of the 19th century found consolation in remarriage and work whereas women depended on the support of family and friends. However, men were expected to repress grief during the period of bereavement but were expected to recover rapidly.

      Death in the Victorian Family, Patricia Jalland

      Better medicine, improved health and increased life span as well as social changes so that the romantic notion of “but we fell in love!” became an acceptable reason to end a marriage and embark on a new one probably had something to do with divorce becoming more acceptable, more common, and contrariwise making it less socially acceptable to marry inlaws because now your former spouse would still be alive if you dumped her to marry her sister.

      • Evan Þ says:
        February 7, 2019 at 10:28 am

        …and contrariwise making it less socially acceptable to marry inlaws because now your former spouse would still be alive if you dumped her to marry her sister.

        Pretty soon, perhaps, you’ll be able to marry both at once! I wonder, will that make it more socially acceptable, or even less?

        • DavidFriedman says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:06 am

          In Rabbinic law you are not allowed to marry your (living) wife’s sister. But a widow without sons is obligated to marry one of her husband’s brothers, although there is a procedure for getting out of it.

          I think I remember reading that in Islamic society, marrying two sisters was considered a good idea, presumably because they were already used to getting along with each other.

          • LHN says:
            February 7, 2019 at 12:03 pm

            The law is especially interesting given that the tribes of Israel are by definition traditionally descended from a marriage to two sisters.

            (Plus concubinage with their maidservants– who I hadn’t realized were themselves considered by the Midrash to be Rachel and Leah’s half-sisters, Laban’s daughters by concubines.)

            Unsurprisingly, there’s been a fair amount of intellectual effort spent to explain why that was permissible.

          • Randy M says:
            February 7, 2019 at 12:17 pm

            Is the Jewish opinion that the patriarchs didn’t have pretty screwed up personal lives?

          • Aron Wall says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:06 pm

            @DavidFriedman
            It’s not just a later rabbinic interpretation; it’s explicit in the Torah in Leviticus 18:18.

            @LHN
            The obvious explanation is that Jacob did it because the incest commandments in the Law of Moses hadn’t been given yet (see also, Abraham and Sarah being half-sibilings). But it sounds like the link you cite is committed to the (rather implausible) idea that the Patriarchs somehow knew about the 613 commandments given to Moses and voluntarily obeyed them before they were revealed.

            @Randy M
            Seems pretty obvious to me that a lot of the things the patriarchs did are reported by the Bible as negative examples that we aren’t supposed to follow. But, Rabbinic Judaism has a really strong hagiographical tendency to try to justify biblical heroes. For exampe, there are rabbinic traditions which argue that David didn’t really commit murder and adultery during the whole Uriah/Bathsheeba affair. According to the Jewish encylopedia:

            David’s thoughts were so entirely directed to good that he was among the few pious ones over whom evil inclinations (“yeẓer ha-ra'”) had no power (B. B. 17a), and his sin with Bath-sheba happened only as an example to show the power of repentance (‘Ab. Zarah 4b, 5a). Some Talmudic authorities even assert that David did not commit adultery, for at that time all women obtained letters of divorce from their husbands who went to war, to use in case the latter should die on the field. Similarly David must not be blamed for Uriah’s death, since the latter had committed a capital offense in refusing to obey the king’s command (II Sam. xl. 8, 9; Shab. 56a; Ḳid. 43a).

          • dndnrsn says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:13 pm

            @Aron Wall

            Speaking of rabbinic tendencies to try to make ambiguous figures into good guys, I vaguely recall from university something about how there’s complicated explanations for why Esau had it coming.

          • Randy M says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:24 pm

            David did not commit adultery, for at that time all women obtained letters of divorce from their husbands who went to war

            Did divorcees really fare better than widows? That’s not what I would assume.

            I vaguely recall from university something about how there’s complicated explanations for why Esau had it coming.

            Orson Scott Card has book series about the women of Genesis. There’s a lot of speculation in the books which generally try to stay faithful to the what is explicitly in the Torah; speculation which bears from either his Mormon doctrine or the needs of a novel to fill in details in the narrative that don’t make a lot of sense to a modern reader, such as there being ancient writings that is what is referred to as “the Birthright”, which studious Jacob respects more than wild Esau, thus justifying what I read as at least some rather underhanded actions by Jacob in deceiving his father.

            The scene in Genesis where Jacob returns to Esau after their father’s death really is a fantastic story of reconciliation though, regardless of, or maybe because of, the ambiguity of how much each was at fault.

          • Evan Þ says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:29 pm

            @Randy M, I’ve heard that explanation before, and I seem to recall its being justified by “what if he’s captured in battle and enslaved by the enemy, or what if he vanishes and we never find his body, so his wife’s left in limbo (since under Jewish law, only men can initiate divorce)? Better to have him divorce her before leaving for war, so we can clear up the situation.”

            On the other hand, I’ve never seen any evidence this practice actually occurred, during David’s reign or at any other time.

          • Randy M says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:37 pm

            Better to have him divorce her before leaving for war, so we can clear up the situation.

            I guess, but that must have left other problems, like the one in the text, especially since casualty rates in ancient warfare weren’t that high.
            Seems like it would have been easier to evolve a norm about annulling a marriage after so many months or years of a missing partner than ritually end/hopefully-restart marriages every campaign.

          • Deiseach says:
            February 8, 2019 at 4:35 am

            at that time all women obtained letters of divorce from their husbands who went to war, to use in case the latter should die on the field

            That seems a bit convoluted – if your husband dies in battle, you’re a widow and free to marry again. I could only see that working if it was reported he was dead, you remarry, and then he turns up alive again after all: oops!

            But it’s not just Jewish commentary trying to retcon things so heroic figures don’t come off as doing shady things, every culture does it; the example from the Ramayana about Sita’s trial by fire, for instance. The original myths would fit with the original society and their attitudes: a woman has to prove her chastity, no question about it. If she got raped while in captivity, that was her problem. But since Ram is the perfect human exemplar and Sita is the perfect wife, later generations have a problem here: there’s the tension between the continuing attitudes about female chastity and the whole Caesar’s wife thing, so social attitudes are still on the level of “prove it or else, and any shade of doubt means you are cast aside, even if none of it was your fault” and the veneration and devotion that has built up around these figures, so to square the circle it has to be that a false Sita was abducted by Ravan – that way, the real Sita is protected from any charges at all of so much as being touched by a man not her husband, and Ram gets absolved of what looks like hard-heartedness; the agni parishka means the fake Sita is replaced by the real Sita.

            You get the same idea, with some Greek authors, behind the real Helen being left in Egypt and a false Helen being carried off to Troy.

          • Jaskologist says:
            February 8, 2019 at 5:18 am

            It’s not just the Rabbis doing that. Augustine has a section where he assures us that while the patriarchs may have had multiple wives, it’s not like they were into it:

            such men do not believe it possible that the men of ancient times used a number of wives with temperance, looking to nothing but the duty, necessary in the circumstances of the time, of propagating the race; and what they themselves, who are entangled in the meshes of lust, do not accomplish in the case of a single wife, they think utterly impossible in the case of a number of wives.

            …. For many things which were done as duties at that time, cannot now be done except through lust.

            He has similar thoughts on the Bathsheba incident, which proves for him that David was not a lusty guy:

            But yet in [Prophet Nathan’s] parable it was the adultery only that was indicated by the poor man’s ewe-lamb; about the killing of the woman’s husband,—that is, about the murder of the poor man himself who had the one ewe-lamb,—nothing is said in the parable, so that the sentence of condemnation is pronounced against the adultery alone. And hence we may understand with what temperance he possessed a number of wives when he was forced to punish himself for transgressing in regard to one woman. But in his case the immoderate desire did not take up its abode with him, but was only a passing guest. On this account the unlawful appetite is called even by the accusing prophet, a guest. For he did not say that he took the poor man’s ewe-lamb to make a feast for his king, but for his guest. In the case of his son Solomon, however, this lust did not come and pass away like a guest, but reigned as a king. And about him Scripture is not silent, but accuses him of being a lover of strange women; for in the beginning of his reign he was inflamed with a desire for wisdom, but after he had attained it through spiritual love, he lost it through carnal lust.

        • Elementaldex says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:22 am

          Do you say ‘pretty soon’ purely as an extrapolation of current social trends?

        • Deiseach says:
          February 8, 2019 at 4:22 am

          Pretty soon, perhaps, you’ll be able to marry both at once!

          Everything old is new again, right? We have one of the Patriarchs, Jacob, ending up married to sisters Leah and Rachel (though that didn’t go so well) and from all the historical/mythological Indian TV shows I’m watching, marrying sisters is seen as not alone okay but a great solution – though there does seem to be the “sibling/first cousin” confusion or conflation of terms going on (as in the debate over the ‘brothers and sisters of Jesus’). Double or more weddings – hey, as long as your son is marrying my daughter, I have another/two more daughters/nieces and you have another/two more sons, let’s marry them all off! – is also popular in these 🙂

      • S_J says:
        February 7, 2019 at 11:20 am

        As I said elsewhere on this thread, I’ve been digging through my own family history, some of which stretches back to the 1700s and 1600s.

        In the American Colonies (and in the United States), I’ve occasionally found a widower who marries the sister of his deceased wife. The instances of this scenario appear to be in the Scots/Irish culture of Kentucky and Tennessee, so I can’t tell whether that was frowned upon by upper-class society or not.

        In another case, I found a widower marrying a neighboring widow…who also happened to be the mother of his own daughter-in-law. (I chalk that one up to a small community, possible economic necessity to keep the farm running, and good relations between in-laws…before their respective spouses passed away.) This case was in the culturally-Puritan areas of New England. This second marriage appeared not to produce any children.

        Somewhat against my own expectation: in the same area of Puritan New England, I’ve found a pair of cousins marrying. This happened when a pair of brothers married a pair of sisters. The son of one of these couples married a daughter of the other couple. Thus, the younger married couple were first cousins through their mothers’ line, and first cousins through their fathers’ line. (Most of the siblings of this cousin-marriage appear to have married outside the range of first-cousins…So it wasn’t a pattern that repeated in that family.)

        I guess that, in general, American social mores about who could marry whom were looser than British social mores at the same time.

        As I hinted, there was probably some level of economic necessity going on: a widower (or widow) might have a hard time keeping their household and farm running without a second wife/husband around.

        But there may be a social aspect: in many places, there were small communities where the pool of potential marriage partners included a noticeable number of cousins (of some degree).

        • SamChevre says:
          February 7, 2019 at 1:32 pm

          I found a widower marrying a neighboring widow…who also happened to be the mother of his own daughter-in-law.

          I actually knew a couple whose surviving parents married each other. (Mennonite, 1990’s)

          • The Nybbler says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:17 pm

            It’s a bit weird, especially for the younger couple, but has there ever been an actual taboo or law against it? The other way around is a bit more controversial (marrying one’s step-sibling), which is illegal in Virginia.

          • John Schilling says:
            February 7, 2019 at 10:33 pm

            My aunt/uncle and (maternal) grandfather/stepgrandmother did the same, younger generation first, as Lutherans in rural Minnesota ca. 1940. Openly, legally, and there doesn’t seem to have been any taboo or high weirdness involved. Note that if you do it in this order, the kids most directly affected are almost by definition grown up and living on their own by the time their respective widowed parents shack up with one another.

        • Deiseach says:
          February 8, 2019 at 4:41 am

          This happened when a pair of brothers married a pair of sisters. The son of one of these couples married a daughter of the other couple. Thus, the younger married couple were first cousins through their mothers’ line, and first cousins through their fathers’ line.

          I have heard of double first cousins like this, it’s rare but it does happen. The worst of it seems to be when wealthy and high-status families marry within a small pool of potential spouses to keep estates and the like within the family, take it too far for too long and you get the Spanish Hapsburgs, or less extremely the inheritance of haemophilia from the children of Queen Victoria intermarrying with European royalty.

    • S_J says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:01 am

      I’ve spent the past year or so digging through my family history.

      Parts of my family have been in the United States since before the United States was a thing…the oldest record is an ancestor who moved to the Colonies in the 1640s.

      I’ve seen ages-of-marriage range across the 20s into the early 30s. I can’t tell whether this is a uniquely American pattern. That age range for first marriage persisted across many generations, from the 1650s to the present day.

      Most of the people I’m looking at were not socially upper-class. I gather that they were middle-class, though some may have been from lower social/economic classes.

      I’ve found couples where one member died young, and the other stayed a widow/widower the rest of their life. I’ve seen situations where a widower married a widow from the area.

      I’ve also found couples that remained married for more than 50 years. Generally, if both members of the couple made it past age 40, they typically also made it past age 60…which usually translates into more than 30 years of marriage.

      To sum up my thoughts… when I see this:

      The marriage institution in Western culture was developed during earlier eras, when life expectancies were considerably shorter. Most marriages lasted fifteen to twenty years, a long time to be sure, but nothing like what is possible today.

      I have to ask how carefully the researcher generated this. Did they generate a table or bell-curve? Did they work from a table of data? Did they compare/contrast their data to the stories generated by the culture of that time?

  22. Tarpitz says:
    February 7, 2019 at 2:07 am

    It sort of depends what you like. My on-ramp for actually liking Shakespeare in my late teens was Henry VI parts 2 and 3, but that certainly wouldn’t be the right route for everyone – depends how much you enjoy preposterous blood-soaked villainy, and how bothered you are by messy story structure.

    I would also urge you to consider at least Much Ado about Nothing and (especially) Measure for Measure among the comedies as essential.

    You’ll also find that the more you read and see, the less you need the secondary materials to get a ton out of them, which may mean you can find time for more than you think.

    • Tarpitz says:
      February 10, 2019 at 1:45 am

      It’s actually a mashup of the battleship named after him and a reference to a line from BoJack Horseman.

  23. RalMirrorAd says:
    February 7, 2019 at 3:25 am

    I have a question for the commentariat, note that this question is genuinely 100% hypothetical

    Let’s say someone has life insurance and then is diagnosed with a terminal illness, I assume certain kinds of life insurance would pay out benefits in this case.

    Let’s also say that in certain countries, it is legal for doctors to perform euthenasia on certain patients if it is agreed that an illness is incurable and the alternative is a slow/crippling/painful death.

    So how would your legal system avoid a situation where doctor’s and patients, or the families of patients, conspire to perform insurance fraud by intentionally misdiagnosing terminal illnesses and then euthenizing the person to quickly obtain death benefits.

    I guess the insurer could hire a doctor or medical professional of their own to perform a diagnoses?

    • March says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:31 am

      I live in one of those countries where euthanasia is legal.

      But my life insurance pays out even if I just straight off kill myself, so I don’t think I’d bother with the whole terminal illness scam.

    • emiliobumachar says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:48 am

      I think the regular laws against murder serve as a good deterrent. There are plenty of potentially very lucrative fraud schemes that just expose you to risk of doing time for fraud.

      Laws allowing euthanasia only allow real euthanasia. Even if the person to die truly agrees with to the whole thing, even if it was their idea, it’s still murder.

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:26 am

        I’m including examples both where a doctor and a third party fool someone into thinking that they’re dying, or examples where someone wants to kill themselves and get full life insurance benefits.

        Obviously if life insurance legally paid out in the case of suicides then this scheme would be unnecessary. I’m assuming insurance companies don’t want to do this, or at the very least don’t want to be seen as incentivizing it.

        • SamChevre says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:18 am

          In the US (I have no idea about other countries), life insurance payouts can be limited to premiums paid for two years after purchase (the contestability period–except in Missouri where it’s only one year), and normally are in the case of suicide. After the policy has been in place for two years, it pays out fully in the case of suicide.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            February 7, 2019 at 5:40 am

            Actually I recall that bit of information being part of my online courses on insurance law. Wasn’t tested. Guess that clears things up.

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:31 am

      What March said. I read the books to get an insurance license[1] in my state and life insurance is very much controlled by the government. They do not want insurance companies trying to screw widows out of money on technicalities. There’s an exclusionary period where if you kill yourself within 2 years of acquiring the policy they won’t pay out, but after that…no fraud[2] necessary. Walk into the insurance office, eat a bullet[3] in front of your agent and they’ll cut a check to your widow.

      [1] My friend had an insurance business with too much work to handle and said if I had a license I could make some easy money on the weekends dealing with some of his overflow. After I read the books but before I could take the exam he had a bunch of life problems and his business went away.

      [2] Fraud is also not a deal-breaker. Do not commit fraud, and if you lie to an insurance agent while you’re applying for a policy and they discover it they’ll put you in a central database and you get essentially blacklisted, but once the policy’s written even if later they discover you lied through your teeth about your medical history or whatever they still pay out. I am no fan of government, but they actually do a really, really good job of protecting the interests of life insurance customers.

      [3] Do not actually do this.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 7, 2019 at 11:02 am

        but once the policy’s written even if later they discover you lied through your teeth about your medical history or whatever they still pay out. I am no fan of government, but they actually do a really, really good job of protecting the interests of life insurance customers.

        That sounds like doing a good job of protecting the interests of life insurance customers who commit fraud on the insurance company, at the expense of the interests of ones who don’t.

        • SamChevre says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:19 am

          It’s a solution to a problem, and I think it works in Coase-compatible terms. Dying while insured is quite rare (rule of thumb is that less than 1% of policies pay a death benefit>premiums+interest.) This means that companies would have a very strong incentive to scrutinize EVERY claim for any mis-statement on the application, and if the policy has been in force a long time it might be hard to prove the truth of claims, or to be certain that they would actually have had a significant impact on the policy issued.

          Current policy lets companies do that during the first two years, when mis-representation is the most costly, has the highest impact, and is the easiest to detect, but not afterward.

        • bean says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:53 am

          @David

          That assumes the insurance companies are honest. Given what I know of the history of the American insurance industry, there’s some reason for rules which stack the deck in favor of its customers. Otherwise, the insurance company starts hunting through the paperwork for errors to keep from having to pay out.

  24. rlms says:
    February 7, 2019 at 3:44 am

    My impression is that Shakespeare’s comedies have not aged very well on the whole.

    Ada Palmer has an interesting article on this.

  25. Tatterdemalion says:
    February 7, 2019 at 4:45 am

    My main piece of advice would be to read a version with footnotes and annotations – a lot of the references and allusions are very obscure nowadays, and I find it helps me get more out of it.

  26. Thomas Jorgensen says:
    February 7, 2019 at 4:47 am

    … “Dont do that”?

    Reading plays is doing it wrong, it is very hard to get anything even approaching the full worth out of them that way – you pretty much need to find a local Shakespearean company and start attending. This should be possible as long as you are in a major metropolitan area.

    Short of that, There is Kenneth Branagh

    • Fitzroy says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:06 am

      And when you get to Othello (definitely my favourite tragedy) make sure you see the 1990 Trevor Nunn version – Sir Ian McKellen’s Iago, and Willard White’s Othello are just phenomenal!

    • AG says:
      February 8, 2019 at 10:10 am

      That’s on the director, though to make the play as accessible as they’d like. Visual language is employed to help make metaphors to illuminate the context, such as various productions of King Richard III using updated aesthetics to parallel modern dictators.
      Plenty of actors also work really hard to make the text accessible in their deliveries. We may not know exactly how a particular phrase is an innuendo, but the actor’s sneering facial expression as they leer at another character’s arse or bosom will convey the intent.

      Regardless of the language, the best productions can be watched with the sound off, and you can still get 90% of the story from the visuals alone.

      That said, if you want an entertaining primer on various plays so you have a sense of themes going in, in lieu of annotated texts I recommend Kyle Kallgren’s youtube reviews of various Shakespeare adaptations, which he also uses to expound on the themes of the plays being adapted.

    • Douglas Knight says:
      February 8, 2019 at 11:09 am

      Atlas, is that your experience? I think most people have exactly the opposite experience, that Shakespeare is more accessible when watched. As AG says, there is additional information in the performances. Not just for clarity, but also for indicating which details are important and which are ephemeral jokes that it’s OK to miss. And being in real time prevents you from getting hung up on details you didn’t understand.

    • angmod says:
      February 9, 2019 at 4:05 pm

      Reading plays is doing it wrong

      To my mind, this is misguided. Reading a play is a very different thing than viewing a play, but they both have their uses. Viewing a play is great because it gives you a specific interpretation of the written text, and that can often make concrete specific elements; that said, as with any interpretation, the production of a play into a performance necessarily means leaving some things out and emphasizing others. I don’t mean editing out dialog: I mean choosing to perform an action or phrase in a certain way that fixes the texts meaning in a certain way. This is a good feature of plays performed, but it’s not the only way to approach a work.

      Reading a play lets you enter into the work without an actor or director limited the emphases or ideas of the work; it gives you access to the raw material, as it were, in all its manifold glory, to revel in the depth, multivalence, and ambiguity.

      I think most people have exactly the opposite experience, that Shakespeare is more accessible when watched. As AG says, there is additional information in the performances. Not just for clarity, but also for indicating which details are important and which are ephemeral jokes that it’s OK to miss. And being in real time prevents you from getting hung up on details you didn’t understand.

      I think this can offer some clarity, don’t get me wrong, but viewing plays has that effect by limiting them. A director or actor can decide what things to emphasize and which to treat as ephemeral, but the clarity and understanding which that might give to you as a viewer is not identical to the work that Shakespeare or any other author created. Again, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it is a different thing than reading a work can give you, and both can be valuable depending on what you are trying to get out of it. I both read and view Shakespeare extensively, but I try to read the plays first so I can contextualize the choices of a particular adaptation.

  27. theredsheep says:
    February 7, 2019 at 4:53 am

    I have read every play in the Shakespeare canon at one point or another in my life. Some of it–especially Love’s Labour’s Lost, which advertises its pointlessness in its title–is really not worth reading. I recommend Troilus and Cressida, which doesn’t fit neatly into comedy/tragedy categories, in addition to Coriolanus and King Lear. Macbeth, yes. I personally dislike Hamlet and R&J, but that might be overexposure. Having to read each so many times for classes made the charm wear quite thin.

    Worth skipping, from memory, are: Titus Andronicus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, Timon of Athens, Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, Henry VIII, and probably a bunch of other dreck that I can’t even remember. The comedies mentioned by others–Twelfth Night, MAAN, Measure for Measure, and I’d add As You Like It–are solid.

    • Anaxagoras says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:40 am

      Aw, don’t skip Titus Andronicus. Sure, it’s dreck, but it’s hilarious dreck. How can you disrecommend a play that has the exchange: “Thou hast undone our mother!” “Villains, I have done thy mother!”?

      The Julie Taymor adaptation I also think is one of the best film adaptations of Shakespeare, not because it’s the best movie, but because it best captures the tone of the play. Lurid, nasty, and kinda funny.

      • J Mann says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:30 am

        I love Titus for Aaron’s snarling “I wish I had time to do more evil” riposte.

        Lucius. Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

        Aaron. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
        Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
        Few come within the compass of my curse,—
        Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
        As kill a man, or else devise his death,
        Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
        Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
        Set deadly enmity between two friends,
        Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
        Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
        And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
        Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
        And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors,
        Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
        And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
        Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
        ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
        Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
        As willingly as one would kill a fly,
        And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
        But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

        • Anaxagoras says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:48 am

          And in context, it’s actually one of the best things he does in the entire play. His boasting of his evil deeds to Lucius is to save his son. Lucius wanted a confession, and Aaron made sure he got what he asked for and more.

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:37 am

        @Anaxagoras

        “…don’t skip Titus Andronicus. Sure, it’s dreck, but it’s hilarious dreck. How can you disrecommend a play that has the exchange: “Thou hast undone our mother!” “Villains, I have done thy mother!”?…”

        I now very much want Sean Connery (or Daryl Hammond) in that role, voicing that line!

        • Anaxagoras says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:50 am

          Aaron is specifically black, so it’d be hard to cast them in the role, though perhaps if you have most of the cast be black, you could have a white Aaron

        • Plumber says:
          February 7, 2019 at 10:16 am

          @Anaxagoras

          “Aaron is specifically black, so it’d be hard to cast them in the role, though perhaps if you have most of the cast be black, you could have a white Aaron”

          Eddie Griffin then for that line, but I like the reverse casting idea as well!

        • AG says:
          February 7, 2019 at 3:02 pm

          I mean you can’t get much better than Harry Lennix in the film version that already exists.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:54 am

        How can you disrecommend a play that has the exchange: “Thou hast undone our mother!” “Villains, I have done thy mother!”?

        “Enter a Messenger, with two heads and a hand.”

        • Anaxagoras says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:50 am

          But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
          How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
          And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
          Poor harmless fly,
          That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
          Came here to make us merry! and thou hast
          kill’d him.

          Truly, Shakespeare’s other comedies have nothing on this one.

      • theredsheep says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:27 pm

        I think The Winter’s Tale is the one that has “exit pursued by a bear,” which is awesome, but the play is still so blah I’m not sure I’m remembering it right. Maybe it was All’s Well, IDK. One good scene or line does not a good play make. TA is just gross.

        • Paul Brinkley says:
          February 8, 2019 at 3:07 pm

          Correct; Winter’s Tale has the bear.

          One fun consequence of this is seeing any production of WT to see how they frame that scene. Particularly community theater, where the production values often vary inversely with the imagination of the director.

          In our local theater’s production, WT was set in the 1960s, and Antigonus dropped some acid and was pursued by one of his own hallucinations. (I still don’t know who managed to locate a teddy bear suit that large.)

    • Deiseach says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:01 am

      Oh, I quite liked Pericles! And really you can’t skip A Winter’s Tale because it starts off, like Othello, with groundless jealousy but manages a happy ending!

      I agree with everyone about Titus Andronicus – this is not art, it was written early in his life and career in the style of the gore’n’revenge favourites of the day, and is pretty much a “popcorn movie”. Just sit back and enjoy the over the topness of it all. Timon of Athens is similar, but with less gore and cartoon entertainment, and a lot more nihilism.

      • theredsheep says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:31 pm

        My memory of Pericles was of a story that starts with incest and then has him sort of wandering around aimlessly. I don’t know, it just didn’t stick with me at all. There’s some Shakespeare that’s amusing enough–A Comedy of Errors being a prime example–but if you’ve got limited reading time and lots of options, there are stronger choices.

  28. Thomas Jorgensen says:
    February 7, 2019 at 5:00 am

    That is too charitable to the leave side, I fear – The problem is not remainer sabotage, the problem is that the leave side did not have an actual plan, and now is going down in infighting entirely internally – After all, what does “leave the EU” mean. Join the EEA instead? Third country status? – Noone decided on that before the results came in. Nor did anyone consider northern Ireland, where a civil war was smothered by “Noone cares which side on an internal EU border you are on enough to kill over it”, and now the UK government rests on a razor-thin majority provided by votes… from northern Ireland.

  29. ana53294 says:
    February 7, 2019 at 5:15 am

    How useful or necessary are laws that criminalize culture-specific crimes that are a crime even without that specific law?

    I recently read an article about Linda Weil-Curiel, a French lawyer that has managed to help in successfully prosecuting 40 cases against female genital mutilation, whereas the UK, has only managed to have 1 case successfully prosecuted. Apparently, in France, they did it without having specific laws against it, just using their own Criminal Code.

    Apparently, in France, you can have a private accuser, that acts on behalf of some organization in trying to help prosecute a crime. The public prosecutor is the one that has to bring charges for a criminal trial, but you can have a private lawyer helping the prosecution. The higher level of specialization allowed by this highly improves succesful prosecutions (they had the same lawyer for all these cases; she has a high degree of experience in handling these cases).

    I don’t know how necessary specific laws are; it seems to me from this example that having experts that specialize in these rare culture-specific crimes and just apply the normal criminal code is more useful than having special laws but a normal prosecutor who is used to robbery and assaults, but not for vast criminal conspiracies where the victims are too afraid and ashamed to testify.

    As she has said in some interviews, cutting somebody’s body part is a crime whether it’s their genitals or their hand (with an exception for male circumcision). No special laws are needed; you just need to have witnesses and to know how to handle these cases.

    • Walter says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:06 am

      “How useful or necessary are laws that criminalize culture-specific crimes that are a crime even without that specific law?”

      I feel like this question is kind of confusing. If I’m reading correctly, you are asking how useful would it be to make something a crime that is already a crime? Well, the naive answer is ‘not at all’, because the state of the world is identical before and after you take this action.

      • ana53294 says:
        February 7, 2019 at 6:27 am

        That’s why I give the example of FGM. FGM is already a crime, because cutting other people’s body parts without medical necessity is a crime.

        So is it useful to have a specific ban against FGM?

        In the same way, beating your wife because her family doesn’t give you money is a crime. Is it useful to have laws that specifically ban dowry related violence?

        • Walter says:
          February 7, 2019 at 6:40 am

          Sounds like no to both questions. These things are already illegal, you gain nothing from making them double illegal.

        • Randy M says:
          February 7, 2019 at 7:06 am

          In the same way, beating your wife because her family doesn’t give you money is a crime. Is it useful to have laws that specifically ban dowry related violence?

          Presumably, beating another person was already a crime; why have any domestic violence laws?

          • Nick says:
            February 7, 2019 at 7:54 am

            One answer is that a specific kind of case is especially heinous in a way the law didn’t already provide for. I would think folks want beating one’s wife punished differently from, say, getting in a fight at a bar.

          • ana53294 says:
            February 7, 2019 at 9:10 am

            Well, in a lot of countries, you have/had exception which specifically said, you can’t beat other people, but you can beat your wife/children. So laws on domestic violence had to be made in order to counter this traditional grandfathered exception.

        • John Schilling says:
          February 7, 2019 at 7:24 am

          FGM is already a crime, because cutting other people’s body parts without medical necessity is a crime.

          So if a parent gives their child a haircut, they go to jail?

          Common sense isn’t universally common. There’s a class of parents-cutting-kids’-body-parts that is maybe legal by statute, definitely legal by common sense and basically never prosecuted. That makes it possible for a policeman or prosecutor to mistakenly reason, “this is one of the common-sense legal things like male circumcision, right?” or “this is a grey area where common sense is not a reliable guide and I could get in trouble if I guess wrong”. A law specifying that FGM is specifically illegal is useful to the extent that this is a problem.

          Now have fun defining FGM.

    • J Mann says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:59 am

      I’m only really familiar with US laws, but there are usually effects of separately criminalizing subsets of existing criminal activity.

      1) It expresses additional societal disapproval of the subset. You didn’t just vandalize your neighbor’s yard, you committed a hate crime by painting a swastika in it.

      2) It allows for more specific punishments – maybe we want to punish hate vandalism more than everyday vandalism, or committing a murder for hire differently than a vanilla murder.

      3) In the US, it can matter whether crimes are punished at the state or federal level. Punching someone in the street is a state offense, but punching them in furtherance of a state criminal conspiracy or because of racial animus can be a federal crime. In some cases, both authorities can try you separately for the two crimes, or we might want to move a subset to the state or federal level because we don’t trust one body to prosecute as strictly as we’d like.

    • Viliam says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:04 am

      How useful or necessary are laws that criminalize culture-specific crimes that are a crime even without that specific law?

      There may be a law… and there may be a taboo about enforcing that specific law in some specific context. (Rape was definitely illegal before Rotterham, it just wasn’t prosecuted because… reasons.)

      A more specific law could overcome the taboo. If you have a law against “X”, cops may be like “let’s go investigate X, but let’s avoid these communities because we don’t want to get accused of racism”. If you have a law against “X, specifically in Y”, and the cops have a department focused on this specific crime, they can’t use the same excuse. (This argument assumes existence of some crime-specific departments… I have no idea whether the police actually works like that.)

      • ana53294 says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:04 am

        So your argument is, it is useful to have police/prosecutor/judges that specialize in the culture-specific subset of the law?

        But you don’t get that with specific laws. You don’t need to have specific laws for that. You just have to provide funding, or allow private organizations to step in, to monitor this specific activity.

    • Theodoric says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:27 pm

      -Possibly people think that FGM should be more seriously punished than garden-variety assault or child abuse.
      -Being convicted of both FGM and child abuse and assault could result in a longer sentence.

  30. JPNunez says:
    February 7, 2019 at 5:36 am

    Ok, I don’t get the Brexit still happening.

    I can see the population voting in the way it did, surprising remainers, but surely politicians now can see the Brexit is unpopular and damaging to them. Yet May, who was a remainer, is trying as much as possible to take the UK out of the EU. Corbyn is putting conditions to _help_ May’s deal for Brexit, where Labour should be a natural opponent. Now there are allegations the BBC is blacklisting remainers.

    I can see some millionaires benefitting from Brexit for whatever reasons, but surely not ALL the politicians are in their pocket? Some of them must be considering what’s going to happen to their popularity if Brexit goes wrong?

    So what’s going on here.

    • EchoChaos says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:48 am

      Why should Labour be a natural opponent? Heavily traditional Labour districts in the heartland of the UK were the biggest supports of Leave.

      It was Corbyn’s brilliant maneuvering on the issue and bringing Labour to being a pro-Brexit party that managed to crush May in the snap election. Remember that initial polls when Labour was anti-Brexit showed that the Tories might win a true majority of votes cast. Corbyn gutted that and took back a lot of traditional Labour constituencies with his deft actions.

      • JPNunez says:
        February 7, 2019 at 6:40 am

        Yeah, I take allegations of high dimensional chess playing with some reluctance. At most I can assume Corbyn wants to let conservatives take the blame, but I am unsure he will emerge unscathed.

      • EchoChaos says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:09 am

        Yes, making the election about social issues instead of the single biggest issue in the country if those are more winning IS brilliant maneuvering.

        I am not sure Labour could have done better in the election with any other tactic. Making the election about Brexit would’ve caused a major loss.

        As for crush, remember that he DID make May lose her majority.

    • dodrian says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:57 am

      Polling since the brexit referendum has remained pretty constant. There is still a very large proportion of the country that wants it to go ahead with it.

      Theresa May’s #1 goal is to stop the Conservative party from splitting, and she must make Brexit happen to prevent that (the loudest pro-Brexit politicians are in the Conservative party).

      Corbyn has in the past campaigned against being part of the European Union, which may be why he hasn’t done much to oppose it. Though really I suspect he just wants the Conservatives to take the blame for Brexit so that he has a better chance in the next election.

    • episcience says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:00 am

      Brexit isn’t unpopular. Certain outcomes, like a no-deal Brexit, are unpopular here, but depending on which polls you read somewhere north of 50% of the country thinks that either leaving is a good idea or a bad idea that the government is committed to follow through on.

      Theresa May, in particular, is suffering from the same curse as David Cameron. That is, she is a moderate remainer leader of a party with a rabid Euroskeptic right wing. Both Cameron and May have governed more to their right on Brexit than they would like to try to shore up internal party support for their leaderships. Not to mention that May won her leadership and then an election as a party leader on the platform of “Brexit means Brexit” — there’s no way Brexit could be abandoned without her resigning her premiership.

    • JPNunez says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:42 am

      This is all very reasonable, but I could see the gov calling for a second referendum now that the Brexit deal conditions are clearer as an acceptable option, unlike the EU just imposing their will on, say, Greece, despite Greece voting against it.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        February 7, 2019 at 7:06 am

        And if Leave wins again, will best two out of three be enough or would there have to be a third referendum? A fourth? A fifth?

        You can’t just keep having referenda until you get the result that you want and then stop. That’s p-hacking the electorate and at that point it’s more honest just to say “no, we’re in charge so you can take your majority vote and shove it ”

        In a democratic country, legitimacy comes from the popular will. Direct democracy is the purest expression of the popular will on an issue: it’s hard to argue with a literal head-count. I’m personally skeptical of democracy but the fact is that the UK went all-in on democratic legitimacy a long time ago. Backing out now and reasserting aristocratic privilege is going to harm the UK’s legitimacy, with consequences potentially much worse than a hard Brexit.

        • beleester says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:14 pm

          How about this? Once Leave has a plan that the EU has said they’re willing to accept, then they hold a referendum. Otherwise you’re pitting the promises of the Brexiteers against the reality of the status quo, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that the promises look better.

          Redoing experiments until you get a result you like is a scientific sin, but redoing experiments because the original was poorly designed is just good sense.

        • The Nybbler says:
          February 7, 2019 at 5:50 pm

          The EU wouldn’t talk until Article 50 was invoked, so that order was infeasible.

          The choices in the referendum were as honest as could be. Leave, or Remain. Those are _still_ the choices.

      • cassander says:
        February 7, 2019 at 5:21 pm

        This is all very reasonable, but I could see the gov calling for a second referendum now that the Brexit deal conditions are clearer as an acceptable option, unlike the EU just imposing their will on, say, Greece, despite Greece voting against it.

        If every state votes for something, and alabama votes against it, is it illegitimate to force that state to go along? And that’s before we even get to the fact that Greece was begging for money from the EU, it’s not illegitimate for them to set terms.

      • spkaca says:
        February 8, 2019 at 5:33 am

        The Government will not go for a second referendum. A second referendum could only be legitimate if it were restricted to a choice between the Withdrawal Agreement and WTO Brexit (AKA ‘crashing out’). This would respect the result of the original referendum, restricting the choice to the question of how to implement it. That is not the agenda of the 2nd-referendum supporters, who, fairly transparently, want Ref2 in order to stop Brexit entirely. A 2nd referendum with a Remain option would be rigged – intrinsically rigged; there would be no way to un-rig it. It would mean that 1 Remain win would be worth 2 Leave wins. The fundamental problem with the entire process has been the refusal of the hard-core Remainers – a minority even among Remainers, but many of them well-placed in Parliament and Government – to accept the result of the referendum.

    • broblawsky says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:43 am

      *When* Brexit goes wrong. I’m now convinced that a hard Brexit is inevitable.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 7, 2019 at 10:56 am

        At a slight tangent …

        Has the UK government made any attempt to negotiate trade agreements with other countries, most obviously the U.S. and the Commonwealth, now that they are theoretically free to do so–agreements coming into effect when the UK leaves the EU? It seems the obvious thing to do. May should have more leverage, both with the UK electorate and the EU, if she can claim to have trade agreements with much of the non-EU world simply waiting for her to sign them.

        • Lambert says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:03 pm

          The other problem is that our future relationship with the EU is still very much up in the air.

          If it were set in stone that the UK would leave the customs union on such-and-such a date, I think we would have more trade deals in place.

          As it is, anybody negotiating with the UK runs the risk that the backstop or something keeps the UK in the EU customs area, and the whole discussion has been moot.

        • The Nybbler says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:13 pm

          The US has permanent normal trade relations with the UK whether or not they’re part of the European Union. (Every country but Cuba and North Korea gets permanent normal trade relations). I don’t know if the US has any special trade deals with the EU, but normal trade relations is pretty good.

      • cassander says:
        February 7, 2019 at 6:00 pm

        even a hard brexit is going to end up preserving the majority of what currently constitutes EU membership. the debate of hard vs. soft is arguing about keeping 70 percent or 90. there will be short term messiness, but rumors of catastrophe are greatly exaggerated.

    • John Schilling says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:35 am

      It’s basically the same thing as Donald Trump still being POTUS in spite of almost all the elites thinking he is an incompetent buffoon and even the electorate disapproving of his job performance at close to 60/40 ratio.

      There’s a slight difference in that the UK doesn’t have a written constitution the way the US does, so the procedure for un-Brexiting is on paper more flexible than impeachment or article 25. But in practice, there are ways for the US elites to have un-POTUSed Trump any time from 2016 to yesterday, and the real constraint is not “is there a written statute that allows or prohibits this?” but “will this do serious damage to our political legitimacy?”. The lack of a written constitution, if anything, means having to be even more careful about destroying legitimacy by doing things that are only technically legal.

      And in a democracy, legitimacy absolutely goes bye-bye if the process is seen as the Elite telling the Masses that they have voted wrong, that they are going to be sent back to vote again until they get it right, and in the meantime the Elites will deliberately botch the implementation to make sure the masses regret their having voted for the wrong thing.

      May et al are Elite, but they understand this.

      • spkaca says:
        February 8, 2019 at 5:18 am

        ‘the process is seen as the Elite telling the Masses that they have voted wrong, that they are going to be sent back to vote again until they get it right’
        Such as happened in Ireland. This (along with the end-run that the EU did around the Dutch and French referendums) was a non-trivial reason why we voted for Brexit.

    • Tarpitz says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:19 am

      Others have made salient points, but also relevant is the fact that neither Labour nor the Tories are truly national parties in the way they were in the past. Rather, they are essentially English parties, and Brexit was and remains the clear majority preference of English voters.

  31. Walter says:
    February 7, 2019 at 6:26 am

    You have probably already read Dominic Cummings blogs about his brexit experience. If not, I urge you to do so.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 10, 2019 at 10:26 am

      Walter, I’d be in agreement with Thomas Jorgensen on this – ” The problem is not remainer sabotage, the problem is that the leave side did not have an actual plan”.

      Right now in the news is the saga of “The ferry company that didn’t have any ships” where the British government was negotiating a contract to prepare for post-Brexit need to handle imports and exports by increasing their shipping and opening up new ports. Well, that’s good, right? They finally discovered, as per the Brexit Secretary, that they really were quite reliant on Dover-Calais crossing due to Britain being, you know, an island. (I’m none too impressed with our own Irish politicians but, by comparison with the Brits, in their handling of this whole topic they appear to be world-class statesmen and great thinkers. The Tories – making our bunch of venal bumblers look competent and working for the public good!)

      Except. They made the deal with a company that didn’t have any ships (you may remember them as the company that copied their terms and agreements from a fast-food site), was a bit shaky on how and when they would get those ships (apparently they set up a fund based in Gibraltar to raise money to buy ships but – if the manager of the investment advisory firm handling this is telling Private Eye the truth – no money to date has been raised, and they’re supposed to be ready to run the service by March), and now at the last minute the contract has been cancelled due, it is claimed, not to the government deciding “hey a ferry company with no ships is not good” but to the Irish shipping company backing them reversing out of the contract, with Jacob Rees-Mogg now promulgating a conspiracy theory that the Irish government pressured said Irish company to do this in order to do down the British government and cause them to fail after Brexit.

      I wish this were fiction but it’s not. Not even a story in the Daily Mail.

      • The Nybbler says:
        February 10, 2019 at 2:23 pm

        The British government is currently Remainers, so that supports the “remainer sabotage” idea.

      • Walter says:
        February 11, 2019 at 5:57 am

        I feel like the problem is both? Like, the gov is primarily Sir Humphreys busily undermining any and all progress, and the Leave crew did not ever expect to win, and certainly didn’t make any plans for what to do if they did. This is pretty consistent with Cummings’ blog.

  32. Well... says:
    February 7, 2019 at 7:18 am

    As much as I like going DIY whenever possible, I have trouble justifying changing my own oil (I know how and can readily borrow the necessary tools). I’ve done the math and it’s only about $10-15 more to have my trusted local mechanic do the job instead. Anybody want to try to convince me why I should change it myself?

    • sfoil says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:39 am

      That extra $10-15 will buy a much better quality filter and probably oil, so you don’t have to change as often, so the savings may be highe. IME even good auto shops usually use the lowest-quality filters available.

      Also, changing your oil forces you to conduct a regular inspection of your car’s undercarriage — or at least gives you a good opportunity to do so, especially if you have access to a lift.

    • John Schilling says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:13 am

      That depends on how much you trust your local mechanic. If you have a true and justified trust in said mechanic, then at that price the only argument for doing it yourself is maintaining a general familiarity with basic auto mechanics for any future occasions when a mechanic is unavailable.

      Otherwise, a non-trusted mechanic can do substantial damage in the course of a botched oil change, e.g. the one who so overtorqued my drain plug that it could not be removed without a blowtorch. And doing it yourself, as sfoil notes, doesn’t quite require but definitely facilitates an inspection of everything else that really ought to be inspected every six months or so. Turning it over to a mechanic, facilitates that mechanic saying “I’ve inspected your car and you really really really need this $50 service and that $75 dollar service and the other $60 service or you will surely die in a fiery crash”, and then you either pay them for things you probably don’t need or you do your own inspection anyway.

    • SamChevre says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:48 am

      For me, my mechanic is annoyed if I want to provide the oil and filter, and I use the long-life oil and heavy-duty filters so I don’t have to change oil as often.

    • The Nybbler says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:28 am

      Nope. Don’t bother. If you’ve done it a couple of times you’re not going to learn anything new, it’s messy and leaves you with an oily tray to clean, and you have to bring the used oil somewhere to be disposed of anyway (and possibly pay to do so).

      Just don’t go to a quick-change place, because easy as it is, they still screw things up. Most catastrophically leaving the drain plug off, but what’s happened to people I know (twice!) is leaving the filler cap off and the last oil can still stuck in the engine (crushed).

    • GlenWill says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:45 am

      I love DIY too, and do just about any job needed at home or on my car. But changing the oil is not worth it to me, for the reason you mentioned.

      For car work, my general standard is that I need to save at least $50/hour to be worth the time. So 4 hours replacing control arms, but saving $1,000 is a no-brainer. But 1 hour changing oil, saving $10, is not worth the time/hassle. There’s also the fun factor. Doing complex jobs is rewarding, changing oil is just messy.

      I’d rather spend that time brewing beer, disassembling a broken appliance, or doing something else fun.

    • Plumber says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:24 am

      @Well…,

      To stay in practice for showing your kids how to do it, or if your really broke and need that ten dollars.

    • Mark V Anderson says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:40 pm

      Yeah I changed my own oil when I was young and poor, but then realized it was one of those things well worth paying someone else to do. Of course back when I did it, I tossed the old oil out behind the garage, and these days that would make me criminal of the year.

    • Well... says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:16 pm

      OK, so far I still haven’t seen a convincing argument.

      sfoil comes closest with an appeal to applying that same $10-15 toward a higher quality filter and oil, possibly resulting in the need for less-frequent oil changes. But…I’m skeptical about the quality increase in oil & filter that amount of money will get me, and it also doesn’t account for the other costs: time spent shopping for oil/filter, time spent coordinating the borrowing of tools with my neighbor, time and effort spent changing the oil and cleaning up afterward, time and effort spent disposing of used oil.

  33. Nabil ad Dajjal says:
    February 7, 2019 at 8:01 am

    This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek rant, but why does Amazon want my relationship to end so badly?

    I’m looking at Amazon’s recommendations for what to buy a woman on Valentine’s day and, strikingly, at least a full third of the products recommend are diet or fitness related. Maybe I have a poor mental model of women, but it’s hard to picture a woman being pleased to receive a gift of a weight loss tracking journal from her significant other. That seems like a passive-aggressive insult more than a sign of affection.

    We have a lot of machine learning people and probably more than a few Amazon employees here, so I’m wondering how these kinds of poorly-concieved gift recommendations are generated. Is it things that women often buy for themselves without consideration of the difference between a gift and an ordinary purchase? Are there hordes of clueless guys buying their girlfriends pink scales for Valentine’s day? Is Jeff Bezos playing the world’s most subtle prank?

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:10 am

      A definitely tongue-in-cheek answer: maybe single people buy more stuff on Amazon?

    • aphyer says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:13 am

      Perhaps Amazon has discovered that men who buy weight loss journals in the days leading up to Valentine’s day inevitably end up buying additional gifts afterwards to placate infuriated significant others?

    • Mr. Doolittle says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:36 am

      Does your wife/SO use the same account? That would be an obvious answer – women purchase these things and so get highly recommended on the account.

      Alternately, and more disparagingly for their AI, maybe they correctly identify what women really buy on Amazon, but haven’t sorted their recommendations in a way that recognizes Things That Should Never Be Gifted and then not recommend those to someone buying a gift. Maybe they can’t tell a gift-giver from a normal self-purchaser? There’s no prompt for you to say you are buying for someone else, right?

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        February 7, 2019 at 9:02 am

        My girlfriend does use my account, but the suggestions don’t seem to be based on things she’s bought. She got a yoga mat one or two years ago but otherwise nothing fitness related afaik, and she’s naturally thin without dieting. Maybe she’s been browsing those without buying, because otherwise I would see notifications.

        There is a prompt, a specific button to select if the Valentine’s day gifts are for a woman, man, pet (!!), etc. Which is why I was so surprised at the suggestions.

        • Mr. Doolittle says:
          February 7, 2019 at 9:37 am

          If there’s a prompt then their algorithm is doing a bad job of optimizing (or there are a lot of couples doing something the rest of us find quite odd…).

          It could easily be the case that Amazon is otherwise doing a great job of modeling your girlfriend based on demographics and that one yoga mat, even if she otherwise doesn’t purchase much. Presumably they know a lot more revealed preferences than anyone without their data set.

    • Randy M says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:58 am

      Is Jeff Bezos playing the world’s most subtle prank?

      Isn’t he in the middle of a divorce?

    • arlie says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:16 am

      My personal experience is that the harder Amazon tries, the less apt their suggestions become. More generally, while these recommendation AIs may be good for business overall, it’s a strictly statistical effect – most of the time, they are wrong, sometimes laughably so.

      Amazon in particular seems to do a lot better with books than anything else, but even there, they are silly. Some obvious error patterns:
      – some things are bought once – you fill a need, and don’t need a new one for decades if ever. Amazon discovers I bought e.g. a good German-English dictionary, and recommends not random material in German, which I might want if I’m learning German – but more dictionaries – mostly German-English, but also several other languages
      – some people have clear purchasing patterns. I never buy undiscounted hardcover fiction. Amazon continues to recommend novels not yet available in paperback, and by the time the paperback comes out, they are so familiar to me that I don’t realize I haven’t read that one yet, and don’t buy it – or alternatively I’ve already picked it up in hardcover at the local public library. Either way it would be a win to never recommend hardcover fiction to me.
      – in groceries, I keep buying two particular flavours of tea my local stores seem unwilling to carry. Even when I search for those flavours in particular, Amazon helpfully treats all teas as equivalent, and gives me lots of non-matches. (Sometimes they do the same for books – I search for a particular author, and they decide to offer me 50% random books in the same genre. In general though, Amazon’s search is more annoying than their recommendations, so adding this may not be fair.)

      • toastengineer says:
        February 8, 2019 at 8:52 pm

        They seem to have a bit of an overfitting problem. Like, I bought a first aid kit and a flashlight for my car, and ever since Amazon thinks I’m a full-blown prepper.

    • The Nybbler says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:24 am

      Not logged in, I get a rather bizarre list including sexy lingerie, a Go Pro case, refurbished phones, grooming products, and even a video game player. But only two fitness items (a weighted vest and a balance beam).

    • Nornagest says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:46 pm

      My guess would be that they just ported over a list of highly gendered purchases (either a generic one or one specific to what Amazon thinks your SO would buy) and didn’t think too hard about how suitable they’d be as Valentine’s gifts.

    • Mark V Anderson says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:36 pm

      This mostly shows that AI is a long ways from taking over the world.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:54 pm

        Either that, or that Clippy is going to be very judgemental about my weight when I go into the paperclip factory.

        “Other people being reduced to their constituent atoms also enjoyed…”

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:12 pm

      Are there hordes of clueless guys buying their girlfriends pink scales for Valentine’s day?

      No, hopefully most guys are not going to Amazon for Valentine’s Day recommendations…flowers, chocolate, wine, lingerie, done.

      FWIW, I just browed my Amazon. I am about 200 items deep and see 1 weighted-vest. Do you buy a lot of fitness stuff online? Maybe Amazon thinks you have one of those weird relationships where you squat together and eat yogurt and hate your life because you eat quinoa.

    • gbdub says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:41 am

      My list is mostly the traditional gifts – candy, jewelry, cosmetics, lingerie. A couple fitness items but not the type that might imply “hey fattie!” More like, “oh what a cute top to wear to yoga!”

      I wonder if it goes off ideas from the gift lists or shopping habits of your friends (people whose wish lists you’ve browsed) who are women? My mom and sister are into yoga, and my girlfriend is into Harry Potter. My “logged in” list had more of those sorts of items.

  34. J Mann says:
    February 7, 2019 at 8:01 am

    If they’re still available, I strongly recommend the Applause publishing line of Shakespeare’s plays. (The “Applause Library” editions, not the “First Folio” editions).

    They have the text of the play on the left page, and staging notes on the right side. It really does a ton to ground the play.

  35. Nancy Lebovitz says:
    February 7, 2019 at 8:48 am

    If only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America were voting, Trump would win in a 50-state landslide.

    A lot of people have pointed out that Trump and his family wouldn’t be allowed to vote under that rule, and I’ve seen one person note that people have a maximum of four grandparents.

    However, hypocrisy and stupidity are boring compared to playing with numbers.

    I don’t think an exact answer is available, but approximately how many Americans have four American grandparents? How likely are 4g Americans to vote for Trump? Are they evenly distributed enough to give Trump a 50 state landslide?

    • EchoChaos says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:19 am

      > I don’t think an exact answer is available, but approximately how many Americans have four American grandparents?

      It depends on state, but I would guess it’s roughly half to two thirds of Americans. Immigration was very low in the 20s through 60s, so the vast majority of people who go before this current wave will end up with all four.

      It’s also almost certainly a vast win for Trump, but I doubt it would be a 50 state win. Vermont, for example, doesn’t have a large immigrant population but Trump got killed there.

      • EchoChaos says:
        February 7, 2019 at 11:18 am

        And since everyone is posting their statistics, all four of my grandparents, all eight of my great-grandparents and at least a majority of my great-great grandparents were born in the United States (I am not 100% sure that it’s all of them, I’ll check my family tree when I get home).

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 7, 2019 at 2:21 pm

          Yeah, looks like Great-Greats are where the non-English parts of my ancestry showed up, right before or after the Civil War, depending.

      • SamChevre says:
        February 7, 2019 at 11:35 am

        I’m a bit unusual; all my grandparents were born in the US, but my father was not.

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 7, 2019 at 11:47 am

          Ann Coulter certainly meant “born a citizen” as both my sisters were born outside the United States as well, although I was born within them.

    • Plumber says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:58 am

      @Nancy Lebovitz

      “….approximately how many Americans have four American grandparents?…”

      If I remember correctly all of my grandparents were born in the U.S.A., but six of my great-grandparents were born overseas, all of my wife’s grandparents were born overseas, and among the crew at work only five out of seventeen of us don’t have parents (and presumably grandparents as well) born overseas.

    • cassander says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:04 am

      what percentage of americans have 4 grandparents born in the US?

    • Chalid says:
      February 7, 2019 at 10:16 am

      Apparently Gallup polled this in 2001 and found that 56 percent of Americans said they had four grandparents born in the US.

      As for the electoral implications, if you believe Gallup, the electorate made up of people with four American-born grandparents would be much less Hispanic, but also somewhat blacker.

      • Chalid says:
        February 8, 2019 at 6:01 am

        Tangentially: I am under the impression that I google stuff for SSC way more often than the average poster. In this OT, there was the Gallup post and the corporate tax distributive impact post.

        a) Is my impression accurate?
        b) Why doesn’t everyone else do that? I mean, someone asks “how many people have four American grandparents” – if you’re interested enough in that question to post a response, how is it that you’re not interested enough to go to google?

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:15 am

          a) Is my impression accurate?

          I will Google basically anything that I want a technical and exact answer to, which happens fairly often here.

          b) Why doesn’t everyone else do that? I mean, someone asks “how many people have four American grandparents” – if you’re interested enough in that question to post a response, how is it that you’re not interested enough to go to google?

          Because my intuition is usually good enough to not take the time. For example, I said “I would guess it’s roughly half to two thirds of Americans”. That band exactly where the correct answer falls according to your link. Getting to within margin of error (+/-5%) on intuition means taking the time isn’t really worthwhile.

          • Chalid says:
            February 8, 2019 at 8:04 am

            Not to pick on your post in particular, which was perfectly fine as these things go, but I don’t think anyone who read it and didn’t already agree with it would have been convinced.

        • Randy M says:
          February 8, 2019 at 8:31 am

          I generally google before making any questionable assertion I might not be remembering right, but not before making questions, as people here might be better at finding trustworthy sources, etc.
          When feeling lazy, I might end an assertion with a question mark to avoid having to look it up. I try not to make a habit of that.

        • Plumber says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:01 am

          @Chalid

          “….how is it that you’re not interested enough to go to google?…”

          Honestly I was expecting only results for how many parents not grandparents are foreign born to show up, and I was just curious to see what other commenters would say and really didn’t want the conversation to end.

          I know that when I’ve done web searches on how many Americans support or oppose the current legality of abortion (I was looking for a proxy for how liberal or conservative Americans are on “social issues’) Gallup told me one thing and Pew told me another, I’ve seen similar disperate results on how prosperous Americans are compared to decades past and I have to go with an aggregate and/or decide on whom I trust.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:41 pm

          I’m not sure about the answer to your question, but relevant is that I also googled, found the same result as you, didn’t find much else of value, and therefore did not contribute to this post.

          Honestly, I think the most relevant thought to this conversation, which I also did not post (although I did type up a draft), is that you shouldn’t argue that people shouldn’t vote unless they have 4 native grandparents, but acknowledge that immigration has changed cultural and political patterns. Most people center-left are not in favor of open borders, but they are in favor of current or open-er borders. Their arguments are typically identical to right-wing arguments (we might change the culture or burden our safety net if we admit too many immigrants), but there is not a clear line when this occurs.

          However, if you are literally electing different leaders because you have immigrants over the last several generations, that is an obvious change, and should make you wonder if we should decrease immigration. Hopefully this would be quite obvious if we somehow admitted 50 million immigrants, gave them voting right, and suddenly elected a native Spanish speaker as President. So…where do you draw the line?

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:
          February 10, 2019 at 9:16 am

          I didn’t google it because it didn’t occur to me there would be research– it seemed like a weird question. In fact, it doesn’t get researched much.

          My guess was that it would be about half.

          And I’m guessing that the proportion has dropped a little since 2001.

      • LewisT says:
        February 9, 2019 at 12:03 am

        That really surprises me. I would have figured the number to be somewhere in the 75% range. But then, I have to go back four or five generations to reach my most recent immigrant ancestor, and many people in my town have to go back even further. I hadn’t realized how nationally unrepresentative this is.

        Edited to add: Perhaps unsurprisingly, my town is overwhelmingly Republican. And while I didn’t vote for Trump, I am currently planning to in 2020.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:06 am

      Given Declining population and aggressive immigration [legal or otherwise] since 1965 this sounds about right. More blacks in relative terms but far fewer hispanics and virtually no east asians.

      • AG says:
        February 7, 2019 at 2:55 pm

        This is weird to me. Surely there were a good number of Chinese railroad workers who have descendants? Or have they since intermarried with white people to where their grandchildren aren’t recognizably East Asian?

        • Plumber says:
          February 7, 2019 at 3:27 pm

          The Page Act of 1875 prohibited Chinese women from entering the United States, and Chinese men were prohibited as well from 1882 to 1943 when the Magnuson Act allowed 105 a year to come to the United States, and there wasn’t much intermarriage until the California Supreme Court ruled against the laws that prohibited Chinese immigrants from marrying whites in 1948.

          Immigration from China really didn’t pick up until more were allowed to come here in 1965.

          They were more Filipinos and Japanese though, but not many came between 1921 and 1965.

    • suntzuanime says:
      February 7, 2019 at 1:04 pm

      Two out of four here, but then, I voted for Trump. I think this sort of sensitivity to demography is one good reason not to take democracy too seriously. If you restrict the franchise to third-generation natives it has an impact, if you raise the voting age to 35 it has an impact, if you rescind women’s suffrage it has an impact. If democracy is supposed to be about harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, why does it turn out to matter so much which crowd?

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      February 7, 2019 at 2:32 pm

      All four of my grandparents were born in the USA. I forget how many great-grandparents were, but if you go back to 1865, a majority of my ancestors were in Pomerania or Catholic southern Germany (Austria? Kingdom of Bavaria? I gotta find the family tree). I recall that somewhere on the paternal great-grand side I’m a German-Mexican mutt by way of Texas, and a German-Protestant Irish (so Scottish…) one on the maternal by way of Nebraska.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:
        February 8, 2019 at 6:30 pm

        One of my grandparents came to the US when he was 8. The rest were born here.

        I’m definitely not a Trump voter.

    • Protagoras says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:13 pm

      I only have two grandparents born in the U.S., though my family name goes back to a guy who arrived in the New World from England in 1637. Still, if it’s those with four U.S. grandparents who are supposed to be the Trump voters, I guess I fit the pattern, as I definitely didn’t vote for Trump.

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:53 pm

        Well I didn’t vote for Trump either but I think all four of my grandparents were U.S. born, but most of their parents weren’t, and my wife’s parents weren’t so that may have something to do with it, but I suspect that my political leanings (though felt strongly) are mostly are due to my being born and living most of my life in Oakland, California, and had I grown up in say Salt Lake City, Utah my politics would likely be different.

    • bullseye says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:33 pm

      All four of my grandparents were born in the U.S., but only half of my great-grandparents. I didn’t vote for Trump.

    • Joseph Greenwood says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:07 pm

      Three of my four grandparents were born in the United States. My grandfather on my dad’s side was born in Hungary.

    • Charles Kinbote says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:08 am

      Framing is a bit odd considering human beings only have four biological grandparents. Or we can take this to the next level of absurdity and calculate Trump’s odds among voters with four twice-divorced, native-born grandparents who all remarried twice each to other native-born Americans. “If only people with at least 12 grandparents born in America were voting…”

    • achenx says:
      February 8, 2019 at 7:42 am

      If we’re posting anecdotes — all four of my grandparents were born in the US, and I believe all eight of my great-grandparents as well, though I am not 100% sure. Great-great-grandparents gets you to some US, some of the German states at multiple points, and at other points I am completely blank.

      Seems like something I would enjoy researching more thoroughly, when I have time.

      (I voted for Gary “Aleppo” Johnson.)

    • b_jonas says:
      February 11, 2019 at 3:23 pm

      This seems a bit absurd to me. If you can’t even make people present an identification document for voting, how would you expect voters to prove where all four of their grandparents were born?

      I for one don’t know where three of my grandparents were born. I could probably find out, because IIRC the place of birth of the parents is listed on birth certificates, and I could probably look at the birth certificate of both of my parents, or ask them if they know.

  36. Deiseach says:
    February 7, 2019 at 9:53 am

    Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are good recommendations, Coriolanus is a bit dull (sorry, Bill!) and probably better watched in an adaptation than read. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors both have convoluted plots, but I think of the comedies I would recommend Much Ado About Nothing (for Beatrice and Benedict), Twelfth Night (for the silly plot with everyone falling in love with everyone else) and As You Like It (for Rosalind).

  37. Douglas Knight says:
    February 7, 2019 at 10:13 am

    I like to sort of do an “apprenticeship” by reading/seeing one of their lesser renowned works

    Why?

  38. DavidFriedman says:
    February 7, 2019 at 10:41 am

    I just read a news story about Cindy McCain claiming to have stopped human trafficking at an Arizona airport.

    “I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted — it looked odd — it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me,” McCain said in the interview. “I went over to the police and told them what I saw, and they went over and questioned her, and, by God, she was trafficking that kid.”

    According to the police, however,

    officers had conducted a welfare check on a child at the airport at McCain’s request but had found “no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.”

    McCain has apologized

    I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from ‘if you see something, say something,’” she wrote.

    She does not seem to have apologized to the woman who she accused of a criminal act on no evidence at all.

    The story goes on to give various figures on the scale of sex trafficking, giving no evidence for them, merely the claims of “Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.”

    As best I can tell, this is simply the modern rerun of the “white slave traffic” campaigns of the 19th and early 20th century. There doesn’t seem to be much if any evidence that anyone is a slave being trafficked, just an excuse for persecuting prostitution, reinforced with a dose of paranoia.

    Does anyone here know of evidence for anything in the U.S. that this is attacking other than consensual sex for pay? It’s the sort of thing that makes me dubious of claims of general progress.

    • ilikekittycat says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:44 am

      I can’t offer anything concrete or specific but there’s a weird “Pizzagate” kind of energy in AZ since Trump got elected about how much pedophilia/sex trafficking/etc. is going on under our noses. It’s totally within the boundaries of logic to me that we might be disproportionately victimized, lots of weird things come with being a border state, but it was never really “in the air” or a kind of persistent thing people talk about until lately. Governor Ducey created some new office to deal with it and started statewide campaigns about it this year as a reaction.

      https://tucson.com/news/local/man-leading-internet-claims-of-tucson-child-sex-trafficking-camp/article_be4184b7-fb9f-5f68-ab4c-8354814f4784.html
      http://www.statepress.com/article/2018/11/spmagazine-what-you-need-to-know-about-human-trafficking-in-arizona

      (Whatever the case, I agree that it’s rich that an admitted thief who stole 15 Vicodin a day from a charitable cause and got away with a slap on the wrist is back lecturing anyone about vice.)

    • Plumber says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:44 am

      @DavidFriedman,

      Beats me if there’s much evidence, but I see lots of “report and stop human trafficking” posters at work, and I’ve even seen billboards with the same message.

    • dick says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:11 pm

      There was a bust recently in Portland that was not just prostitution, at least according to the article about it. More details here.

      More generally, I don’t think there’s a clear line between “sex trafficking” and “consensual sex for pay”. Is it consensual if the woman is free to leave, but has been duped or misled in to a situation where she has no support network and few options? It may be that some of the media attention around trafficking is sensationalistic, but at the same time I think it’s pure fantasy to think that you can go out to a seedy motel and get a beej from a woman who doesn’t speak your language and imagine yourself to be transacting with a rational economic actor who made an uncoerced choice of profession.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:29 pm

        What does “uncoerced choice of profession” mean? I would assume that the woman is in sex work because her other alternatives look worse to her. And I don’t assume that poor foreigners are less rational actors than rich Americans.

        • dick says:
          February 8, 2019 at 10:04 am

          Imagine a hypothetical prostitute who is maximally empowered, in the libertarian “people should be free to do sex work if they want to” sense. She has options, she could stay and work on the family farm, but she has made a rational and informed and sober and uncoerced decision that hooking is the life for her. I’m saying, I don’t believe that that woman will end up in the situation that the “sex trafficking bust” articles typically describe.

          Conversely, many of the women who are found in that situation say they were misled in to it with promises of legit work as housecleaners or garment work, and once you’ve been duped in to a situation where you options are artificially constrained by having no support network and not speaking the language and not being able to go to the police, I think you’re no longer able to make an uncoerced and rational choice, as your options have been artificially constrained.

          • Jiro says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:49 am

            There’s always the argument that people go into constrained situations all the time. Presumably she entered the constrained situation because she was getting paid enough for it, including payment for the risk of being worse off once she is constrained. Back when the Weekly World News was a thing, people worked there knowing very well that doing so decreased their chances of getting a future job at a reputable newspaper; the WWN raised the salary to compensate for the risk.

            And if she lacked enough knoledge to figure out how much she was being constrained, surely, in a free market, services would have popped up to tell her for a small fee.

            No, I don’t believe any of this (except the part about the WWN). Libertarianism deals badly with desperate people.

          • aristides says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:11 am

            Even rational actors lose bets. It could be rational for a poor woman to hire a coyote to bring her to the states since there is a high chance at a better life, and a low chance at sex slavery. But when a woman finds that the coyote lied about taking her to her family or a respectable job and instead offers her prostitution or fending for herself in a strange country, her choice has been significantly restrained. She might have took this risk into account, but humans don’t always accurately calculate risk, and even if she did, I’d argue society has an obligation to help people that get the bad side of a risk to some extent, and especially has an obligation to punish the perpetrators of fraud and sex trafficking.

          • albatross11 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:27 am

            No kidding. If we catch people holding other people in effective slavery, the slaveholders need to die of old age in prison. This not only is justice, it also encourages similarly-inclined people to find a new strategy to make money.

            OTOH, if it’s just prosecutorial inflation of standard prostitution, then nobody ought to go to jail IMO. I strongly suspect the prosecutions that shut down online ads for drugs and prostitutes made the world a much worse place.

          • Protagoras says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:19 pm

            The sex trafficking bust articles are typically deceptive. Really, doesn’t everybody around here know that pretty much every news story on any topic is deceptive? In the case of news stories about “sex trafficking,” they commonly present quotes uncritically taken from law enforcement, and almost never bother to quote or even talk to any of the prostitutes involved.

      • Protagoras says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:40 pm

        A lot of vague words and unexamined quotes from law enforcement in that article, but I don’t really see anything solid that clearly establishes that was actually more than a typical prostitution bust. And since almost all of the prominent, high profile law enforcement efforts against “sex trafficking” these days do turn out to be just typical prostitution busts, I would want to see something solid before I concluded this instance was any different.

      • J Mann says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:04 am

        Every so often, you see a story about someone who has a “domestic slave” – someone who is in the US illegally and who the guilty party has basically trapped into continuing employment on threat of deportation. I imagine sex trafficking is something like that.

        • albatross11 says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:22 am

          And that’s why we build prisons….

        • Protagoras says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:25 am

          Illegal immigrants are exploited in a bunch of ways in pretty much every profession they work in. If illegal immigrants work as prostitutes, yes, they are sometimes exploited in the ways illegal immigrants in other professions are exploited. What research there is suggests that the level of exploitation of illegal immigrants in prostitution is not worse but probably a little less bad than the level of exploitation in other fields that have a large number of illegal immigrants. But that is of course not the same as saying that it doesn’t exist. However, the overall situation bears little resemblance to the standard sex trafficking narrative.

    • J Mann says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:50 pm

      My daughter is involved in a sex trafficking awareness charity at her college.

      It certainly seems *plausible* that at least some sex workers have been transported across state or national lines under circumstances that gives their pimps an unreasonable degree of control over them, but I have no idea what the number is.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:31 pm

        The fact that prostitution is illegal means that prostitutes have fewer alternatives than they otherwise would, and may be more dependent on pimps to function in an illegal market. That’s an argument for legalizing prostitution, not locking up prostitutes.

        • Mark V Anderson says:
          February 7, 2019 at 4:26 pm

          or locking up their customers, IMO. And it is locking up the customers that is the big push these days.

          • Protagoras says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:22 am

            How does locking up the customers help the prostitutes? Restricting their options further will somehow make them less dependent?

          • John Schilling says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:28 pm

            How does locking up the customers help the prostitutes?

            To steelman this, locking up customers makes it less profitable to be a pimp, which results in fewer lying pimps telling the damn dirty lie that being a prostitute in Berlin/Vegas/Dubai/wherever is better than being a farmer’s daughter in Moldova, which helps the women not become prostitutes in the first place. For the women who already are prostitutes, it may reduce the incentive or ability to maintain a transnational enforcement network that threatens their family in Moldova if they run away from their brothel in wherever.

            Restricting their options further will somehow make them less dependent?

            If the options are sufficiently bad, it actually can. E.g., the option to drink the cheapest sort of moonshine, that gets you just as drunk as the better sorts and costs half as much and is usually made of ethanol rather than methanol. Taking away that option makes drunks much less dependent on the state hospital for the blind.

            In the case of prostitution, I’m not actually certain it is a lie that being a prostitute in the West is worse than being a farmer’s daughter in Moldova, and I am quite certain that at least some people are using that narrative to go after women who never were Moldovan farmers’ daughters and didn’t need a pimp to force or deceive them into freely choosing sex work. But the argument is out there, and it isn’t always entirely wrong.

        • aristides says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:21 am

          You can legalize prostitution while keeping human trafficking illegal. As it is, the vast majority of prosecutions for human trafficking are for the pimps/coyotes. Sex Trafficking of minors make up the bulk of the prosecutions and trafficking of normal labor is the lowest priority.

          The article also gives some evidence that it is used for something more than attacking consensual sex, as long as you support statutory rape laws. Looks like roughly 60 human traffickers are prosecuted annually for sex trafficking minors. You can make your own guesses on how many are never prosecuted, and how many victims each has.

    • Theodoric says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:03 pm

      Isn’t part of the issue that “consensual” and “trafficking” aren’t used by activists the way most people use them? Like, someone who could not make the rent without the income from their sex work is “non-consensual” (how many entry-level workers would be able to make the rent if they abruptly quit their jobs?) and a sex worker who lives in NJ and takes the PATH to NYC has “trafficked” herself?

      • Protagoras says:
        February 7, 2019 at 3:49 pm

        I would draw a distinction here; activists abuse “non-consensual” in the way you suggest. It is law enforcement who mostly abuse “trafficking” the way you suggest. Though the two groups do tend to work together and reinforce one another’s stories.

    • Erusian says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:26 pm

      As best I can tell, this is simply the modern rerun of the “white slave traffic” campaigns of the 19th and early 20th century. There doesn’t seem to be much if any evidence that anyone is a slave being trafficked, just an excuse for persecuting prostitution, reinforced with a dose of paranoia.

      My understanding, admittedly gleaned with two anti-slavery activists (though fairly high up in their organizations) is that they focus on the idea because it is salacious and elicits donations. Kidnapping innocent little girls and forcing them into prostitution is vanishingly rare. The organizations that traffick humans do kidnap but it’s almost exclusively for ransom. If they do kidnap slaves, the flow is mostly in the other direction: they kidnap from poor foreign countries and traffick them into the US. But that is not especially common.

      In general, they said, prostitution is not the main thrust of slavery, which is born out by various economic indicators including that male slaves are worth more. It’s mostly hard labor tasks like mining, farming, etc. It’s also much, much more common in South Asia and Africa than basically anywhere else. (With some outliers like Haiti and North Korea.)

      But if you want to get money, attention, and laws, pretty white women in distress apparently works best. Or at least that is their opinion.

      • aristides says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:36 am

        None of the articles about this incident mention the specific races of the people McCain accuses, and yet both you and David Friedman seem to assume that the child was white and the woman was another ethnicity. When I read the article I assumed the opposite, since white victims make such a small percentage of human trafficking victims. There is no way to know for sure what actually happened, but would it change your opinion if the child wasn’t white?

        • DavidFriedman says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:05 pm

          and yet both you and David Friedman seem to assume that the child was white and the woman was another ethnicity.

          I do not believe anything in my comment implied that in any way. I referred to the “white slave traffic” because that was the term used a century or so back by people who were attacking prostitution by pretending it was involuntary.

          My opinion would not be changed by discovering that the child was not white, since I made no assumption about that.

        • Erusian says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:05 pm

          None of the articles about this incident mention the specific races of the people McCain accuses, and yet both you and David Friedman seem to assume that the child was white and the woman was another ethnicity. When I read the article I assumed the opposite, since white victims make such a small percentage of human trafficking victims. There is no way to know for sure what actually happened, but would it change your opinion if the child wasn’t white?

          Really? Please show me where that assumption is in my post. As far as I recall, I don’t discuss the incident at all, just a marketing strategy by anti-slavery campaign. But if you point out what I said about the race of the child, I can discuss it.

    • AlesZiegler says:
      February 8, 2019 at 10:15 am

      There doesn’t seem to be much if any evidence that anyone is a slave being trafficked, just an excuse for persecuting prostitution, reinforced with a dose of paranoia.

      Does anyone here know of evidence for anything in the U.S. that this is attacking other than consensual sex for pay?

      No, but I read once on Vox article making very same point as you, in 2015, and here it is, by German Lopez. Key point:

      The prominent argument against decriminalization is that it will lead to more sex trafficking as the market and demand for prostitution grows. Unlike other arguments against decriminalization, which tend to focus on morality, this point poses an empirical question — and proponents of this view often cite studies that suggest decriminalization leads to more trafficking.

      But the research on the connection between legal sex work and human trafficking is very flawed. Both issues are inherently difficult to study, since they’re mostly illegal activities. But anti-decriminalization advocates often cite research that makes incredibly basic mistakes.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:
      February 8, 2019 at 4:35 pm

      It’s 2019. We don’t have to wait for one moral panic to subside before we start cranking up the next one.

      • John Schilling says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:33 pm

        So, McCain was wrong on the facts, the mother and daughter were of the same race and ethnicity, it’s just that the little girl was in blackface?

        Wake me when it’s 2020, please. Or maybe 3020.

  39. Plumber says:
    February 7, 2019 at 11:35 am

    I’ve been waffling about asking about this because I usually agree with Paul Krugman and his neo-Keynesian economic agenda, but his last column in which he states:

    “…Donald Trump, who ran on promises to expand health care and raise taxes on the rich, began betraying his working-class supporters the moment he took office, pushing through big tax cuts for the rich while trying to take health coverage away from millions.

    These are, it turns out, related stories, all of them tied to the two great absences in American political life.

    One is the absence of socially liberal, economically conservative voters. These were the people Schultz thought he could appeal to; but basically they don’t exist, accounting for only around, yes, 4 percent of the electorate.

    The other is the absence of economically liberal, socially conservative politicians — let’s be blunt and just say “racist populists.” There are plenty of voters who would like that mix, and Trump pretended to be their man; but he wasn’t, and neither is anyone else…”

    bugs me.

    It’s the “racist” label I don’t like (I do think most  people are racist to some extent, but calling out those who don’t fall into the “conservative”, “libertarian”, and “progressive” camps, that is those who are usually what is usually called “populist” as significantly more racist than the rest seems wrong to me), as I know plenty of “social conservatives/economic liberals” (‘liberal’ in the mid-20th century sense, not the 19th century or late 20th century ‘neo-liberal’ sense), many of them aren’t white, so I don’t think the “proponents  of systematic white supremacy racism” slur applies to them, and both the white and none-whites seem mostly motivated by their faiths and being anti-abortion, also there’s enough evidence that Obama-to-Trump voters swung the election in 2016, and while it may be argued that those voters “aren’t anti-black, but are instead anti-Mexican, so still racist”, but I don’t think being anti-more immigration is the same, as I think a strong case may be made that limiting immigration may be effective affirmative-action for black Americans who in the ’60’s and ’70’s were getting closer to economic parity with whites before falling again in the 1980’s, but even if the “racist” slur is true, those voters are still persuadable, but I doubt that they will be if they feel slandered as “deplorables”, so what is the benefit of this essay?

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:41 am

      so what is the benefit of this essay?

      Signalling to democrats that they are part of the “good” collective morality.

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 12:03 pm

        @Conrad Honcho,

        That kind of signalling loses elections, not unlike the “circular firing squads” endemic to the left, purity doesn’t create governing coalitions, I just don’t get it.

        • Randy M says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:14 pm

          Elections? What is Paul Krugman running for?

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:15 pm

          Getting your people out to vote is more important than trying to persuade the opposition. “Vote for us and we’ll pat you on the head and call you a good person” seems to work.

    • SamChevre says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:41 am

      Random detail, but I’m always amused with the big tax cuts for the rich comment.

      The 2017 tax bill was the largest tax increase on high incomes since 1993 (via the cap on real estate and state tax deductions). Somehow, this never gets commented on favorably by the “increase taxes on the rich” crowd.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        February 7, 2019 at 12:17 pm

        I also have no clue where Krugman got the idea Trump ran on increasing taxes for the rich. He wanted to revamp the corporate tax structure so corps would bring more money back to the US, but that’s not a tax hike on the rich.

        • Eric Rall says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:36 pm

          I suspect Krugman is thinking of Trump’s support for a one-time 14.5% wealth tax when he was testing the waters for the Reform Party nomination in the 2000 election cycle, which some conservative groups brought up as an argument against Trump during the 2016 primaries.

        • dick says:
          February 7, 2019 at 12:57 pm

          He talked about it colloquially a lot – “I was talking to my rich friend so-and-so, and he said hey, you can raise my taxes, I’m doing OK! and I thought that was a good idea” type stuff. I don’t think he ever proposed a detailed plan, but vague talk without a detailed plan is kind of how he proposes things.

      • gbdub says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:41 pm

        “Huge tax cuts for the rich” is basically just partisan boo-lights – the point is to make people who already agree with you say “boo, rich people!” rather than to provide any meaningful insights.

        Krugman has a column because he’s a well-credentialed economist, but there’s very little in your excerpt that’s not straight pro-coastal Democrat, anti-GOP boilerplate.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:19 pm

      Enough hispanic migrants can strengthen the democratic coalition to pursue more aggressive forms of redistributive social justice [Civil rights 2.0?] on behalf of blacks. One could argue. So even if saturating the labor market lowers wages [of blacks], one can make up for it by extracting the difference from whites; something you can’t do without national super-majorities.

        • The Nybbler says:
          February 7, 2019 at 1:10 pm

          Except, presumably, for white people. Including white people with Jewish and Italian forebears who lived in redlined areas (which includes a lot more people than just me, surprisingly). AOC is kind of the perfect illustration of how the Democratic Party has a set of policies all of which I find harmful. I may not like the Republicans much, but at least they aren’t diametrically opposed.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            February 7, 2019 at 1:19 pm

            AOC is kind of the perfect illustration of how the Democratic Party has a set of policies all of which I find harmful. I may not like the Republicans much, but at least they aren’t diametrically opposed.

            This. Not going to vote to hurt myself, thanks. (To be fair, the Republican donor/elected official class could implement policies that hurt me while only paying lip service to my tribe. Representative government sucks.)

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            February 8, 2019 at 2:12 pm

            In rank order, I prefer

            1. What Republicans say they will do (not counting the past few years where I can’t figure out what’s going on)

            2. What Democrats actually do, barely ahead of:

            3. What Republicans actually do,

            4. What Democrats say they will do.

            I often vote D because #2 over #3, but I am always nervous that one day the Democrats will start doing what they talk about doing.

        • Nornagest says:
          February 7, 2019 at 1:14 pm

          Honestly, if I could pay a few thousand bucks and in exchange we declared the whole set of race issues in US politics forevermore settled and I’d never hear about them again, I’d probably take the deal. But for some reason I don’t feel like that’s on the table.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            February 7, 2019 at 4:00 pm

            So would a lot of people, but if a few thousand bucks doesn’t institute equality between the self-defined races. [on a per person basis, which would amount tens of billions of dollars presumably] the politics wouldn’t change.

            Also a desire to see the obligations extinguished with an admittedly fat check in that fashion would be interpretted as incincerity/duplicity.

          • Mark V Anderson says:
            February 7, 2019 at 4:09 pm

            +1 to Nornagest

        • Deiseach says:
          February 8, 2019 at 8:48 am

          I don’t know, I get the impression that Ms Ocasio-Cortez is a smart (if green and inexperienced) politician who is throwing out a lot of these kind of policy suggestions, knowing full well there’s a snowball in hell’s chance of them ever being implemented, but it sounds great to her base and like she’s really out there being all M(s) Smith Goes To Washington (if it wasn’t for those darned entrenched power bases and special interests, we’d have our flying cars by now!) and it will enable her to grow her career. The tricky balancing act is between being radical enough to keep those who voted her in (and the members of the media and social media who are in a tizzy over how very wonderful she is) believing versus not being so radical as to piss off the heavyweights in the party who still hold enough clout to put the brakes on her progress. See her gamble in challenging or appearing to challenge Nancy Pelosi as the old guard, and Pelosi patting her on the head in response (but after not selecting her to sit on the special committee for climate change, which Ocasio-Cortez said she had been invited to do but rejected in order to concentrate on presenting her Green New Deal).

          The Green New Deal is a good example, it’s got some reasonable points, some moonbattery (does it really say every building in America to be fitted out to be energy efficient? every single building, which means every falling down old house and rural shack?) but because it’s a non-binding resolution, it’s win-win either way: it’s not implemented, so her supporters can continue to believe it was Big Bad Old Politics that put the kibosh on, or it is accepted but doesn’t commit anyone to actually lift a finger to do anything, so everyone can pat themselves on the back for being forward-thinking and proactive.

          • albatross11 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:22 am

            Ocasio-Cortez is a young, pretty version of Trump–she’s amazingly skilled at playing the media, at least in the current media environment. And she’s charismatic as hell. I could easily imagine her becoming president sometime in the next few years.

            Part of that skill involves making proposals and claims that aren’t logically or financially sound, but that have the right emotional valence. They work at establishing her image the way she wants. Her enemies love to point out the logical flaws and errors in her comments, and by doing so, they spread her image and her words even further. This is exactly what Trump did.

            I don’t know if she thinks deeply about policy–right now, she doesn’t need to, because she’s just a single member of congress. But her ideas about policy are not going to be reflected in her public statements, anymore than Trump’s are. She’s playing a different game than that.

    • Mr. Doolittle says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:30 pm

      That’s a…remarkably uncharitable take from Krugman!

      The interesting thing about the “Socially conservative, economically liberal” segment of the population is that this used to be one of the primary demographics of the Democrats – Union members. Down-to-earth hardworking people who cared about worker rights and fair treatment from business interests. For the left to have turned so far away from them that we can see articles like this speaks volumes.

      Even if he had broken it down (especially if he were very clear about it) that there were Racists in that group, and then there were Populists – but he just goes ahead and calls them one continuous group.

      I know Krugman has never been particularly good outside of economics (and increasingly partisan even within that), this seems quite low by his and NYT standards.

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:38 pm

        @Mr. Doolittle

        “…The interesting thing about the “Socially conservative, economically liberal” segment of the population is that this used to be one of the primary demographics of the Democrats – Union members. Down-to-earth hardworking people who cared about worker rights and fair treatment from business interests. For the left to have turned so far away from them that we can see articles like this speaks volumes”

        it does and they, we (including me) were, but even if you crave social liberalism so much that no compromise is acceptable, the numbers don’t add up!

        While the majority of eligible voters are to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues, so many are “social conservatives” that it’s impossible to have a majority coalition without some, and flat out alienating them is a fast track to losing. 

        Going by the polls a revival of the “New Deal coalition” is possible, but a post ’60’s “New Left” coalition is against the wishes of the majority of eligible voters,  as while liberals outnumber conservatives and libertarians, conservatives plus populists outnumber liberals and libertarians, social conservatives are the majority (slightly) just as economic liberals are, and any majority national coalition must include some populists.

        Half a loaf is way better than going hungry, in 2018 Democrats ran hard on healthcare, and won, because being able to see a physician is popular.

        “Social liberalism” is popular as well (especially among college graduates), but it’s still not favored by the majority of eligible voters, so not popular enough to win!

        I want some of that loaf, and the “shooting yourself in the foot” campaigning is head-bangingly frustrating for me.

        • gbdub says:
          February 7, 2019 at 2:28 pm

          I think “socially liberal” still has some winning positions, but most of the winnable positions of social liberalism are already won. Mainline anti-racism is popular, harder left identity politics are not really popular. Gay marriage is popular enough, a harder push for trans people in your bathroom is not. Abortion is messy… but we seem to be at the point where a majority wants the status quo or more restrictive. “Separation of church and state” is popular, hard anti-religiosity is not. Basically, the stuff that was socially liberal in the early 90s is now mainstream, but we might be hitting a bit of a (probably temporary) wall.

          Drug law liberalization is maybe popular enough? And looking for a champion?

          • Garrett says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:29 am

            > Drug law liberalization is maybe popular enough? And looking for a champion?

            I’d love to see it. But I don’t recall seeing any serious Federal proposals in the legislature. Obama at-best said that he had done cocaine a long time ago. But we I haven’t seen people pushing for drug legalization generally or in specific.

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:50 pm

      I think there’s a lot of voters in the US – not all of them current Republican voters, not by far, and certainly not all of them white – who would vote for a Christian Democratic party if it existed and if the US had a system that wasn’t fixed around two parties. To say that this combination is racist is ludicrous – racists in Europe are not happy about the actions of Christian Democrats such as Merkel!

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:23 pm

        @dndnrsn,

        The American Solidarity Party exists and has an interesting platform but, as you said, our system is fixed around two parties.

    • gbdub says:
      February 7, 2019 at 1:35 pm

      “would doom it with much of the current Trumpian base, because for those people, the cruelty is the point.”

      Neither true, kind, nor necessary. Exactly the sort of stuff Plumber was complaining about Krugman doing.

    • DavidFriedman says:
      February 7, 2019 at 3:24 pm

      Not your point, but this struck me:

      pushing through big tax cuts for the rich

      In what sense does that describe the tax cuts? There was a big cut in the corporate income tax, but corporations are not actual people even if they are legal people, so to determine the distributional effect one would have to figure out how much of the cut ended up going to stockholders, how much to customers, how much to employees, the three groups most obviously affected.

      Two of the controversial elements were the limits on the deductibility of mortgage interest–applying only to interest above $750,000–and of state taxes. Both of those had their negative impact mostly on upper income taxpayers.

      • Plumber says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:09 pm

        @DavidFriedman,
        There’s been lots of headlines like “The Trump Tax Cuts Did One Thing: Give Rich People More Money“, which if you read the article are actually speaking of corporate tax cuts, I think the theory of how this is “tax cuts for the rich” is shown by:

        “…For the moment, the evident impact of the tax cuts is to widen the gap between what workers earn and what people who own companies earn…”

        to which someone could respond “Workers pension funds own corporations”, as how to suss out who and what owns what your guess is better than mine.

      • Chalid says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:18 pm

        The amount going to stockholders is obviously extremely tilted to the rich. The amount going to employees is closer to flat, with a bias toward the rich (corporate employees being higher-income than the general population) and the consumer component is pretty flat. So unless the amount going to stockholders is near zero, a corporate tax cut favors the rich, right?

        My understanding is that the empirical estimates of the amount going to stockholders are much higher than zero (30%-70%), which makes the tax pretty progressive, right?

        • RalMirrorAd says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:54 am

          Incidentally yes. But if you want to tax shareholders, one could do so more efficiently by simply taxing shareholders directly. Taxing the income of a corporation before they figure out how to distribute the gains is less efficient in this regard. This is why most non-US countries don’t tax corporate income as harshly as the US does.

          One issue though is the super-rich of most countries makes their income through investment. Economists are loath to tax investment as harshly as income because they consider it the source of modern standards of living.

          • brad says:
            February 8, 2019 at 2:56 am

            That’s a non sequitur. They didn’t simply tax the shareholders directly, so that they could have is neither nor there when it comes to the distributional consequences of the tax change.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            February 8, 2019 at 4:58 am

            The law itself as it was written didn’t. I just mean that if someone wanted to tax shareholders, doing it through the corporate income tax is a bad way to do it. Not that the tax bill as it was written wasn’t redistributive because they *did* in fact do this.

            I’m still inclined to think that the bill was upwards redistributive, but someone would have to do the math to figure out to what extent in the face of the changes to SALT and the mortgage interest deduction changes they would have.

            But even if it is upwards distributive, the quality of public discourse on this is quite abysmal; wealth and income get treated synonymously as does the idea of a ‘corporation’ and a ‘rich person’.

          • Chalid says:
            February 8, 2019 at 5:53 am

            Just going from Wikipedia, the CBO says that it’s pretty regressive (poorer people see increased costs, richer people get more benefits).

            During 2019, income groups earning under $20,000 (about 23% of taxpayers) would contribute to deficit reduction (i.e., incur a cost), mainly by receiving fewer subsidies due to the repeal of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Other groups would contribute to deficit increases (i.e., receive a benefit), mainly due to tax cuts.
            During 2021, 2023, and 2025, income groups earning under $40,000 (about 43% of taxpayers) would contribute to deficit reduction, while income groups above $40,000 would contribute to deficit increases.
            During 2027, income groups earning under $75,000 (about 76% of taxpayers) would contribute to deficit reduction, while income groups above $75,000 would contribute to deficit increases.

            It also quotes an analysis by the Tax Policy Center with similar conclusions:

            Compared to current law, 5% of taxpayers would pay more in 2018, 9% in 2025, and 53% in 2027.
            The top 1% of taxpayers (income over $732,800) would receive 8% of the benefit in 2018, 25% in 2025, and 83% in 2027.
            The top 5% (income over $307,900) would receive 43% of the benefit in 2018, 47% in 2025, and 99% in 2027.
            The top 20% (income over $149,400) would receive 65% of the benefit in 2018, 66% in 2025 and all of the benefit in 2027.
            The bottom 80% (income under $149,400) would receive 35% of the benefit in 2018, 34% in 2025 and none of the benefit in 2027, with some groups incurring costs.
            The third quintile (taxpayers in the 40th to 60th percentile with income between $48,600 and $86,100, a proxy for the “middle class”) would receive 11% of the benefit in 2018 and 2025, but would incur a net cost in 2027.

            Taxpayers in the second quintile (incomes between $25,000 and $48,600, the 20th to 40th percentile) would receive a tax cut averaging $380 in 2018 and $390 in 2025, but a tax increase averaging $40 in 2027.
            Taxpayers in the third quintile (incomes between $48,600 and $86,100, the 40th to 60th percentile) would receive a tax cut averaging $930 in 2018, $910 in 2025, but a tax increase of $20 in 2027.
            Taxpayers in the fourth quintile (incomes between $86,100 and $149,400, the 60th to 80th percentile) would receive a tax cut averaging $1,810 in 2018, $1,680 in 2025, and $30 in 2027.
            Taxpayers in the top 1% (income over $732,800) would receive a tax cut of $51,140 in 2018, $61,090 in 2025, and $20,660 in 2027.

            Anyway, probably one can quibble with the CBO and Tax Policy Center, and I don’t have the expertise to critique them anyway. But it agrees with my basic economic intuition based on eyeballing the components of the bill and their relative sizes and relative progressivities.

            I actually didn’t think it was a bad bill, all in all; it was much better than I expected it to be going into the process. But it is certainly not ridiculous or deceptive to say that it’s tax cuts for the rich.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:30 am

            Putting it as “the top X% of the taxpayers receive Y% of the benefit” is a bit misleading.

            Suppose you simply cut all taxes by 10%. It would be odd, although not impossible, to describe that as “big tax cuts for the rich.” But since the top 1% of the population pay much more than 1% of the taxes, they would get much more than 1% of the benefit.

            It would seem more natural to sum up the results as “the top 1% pay X% less, …, the bottom 20% pay Y% less.”

          • Chalid says:
            February 8, 2019 at 1:11 pm

            Your example is a standard example of problematic language, and perhaps you’re just used to having that argument, but that is not what is going on here. The quoted CBO text claims that lower-income taxpayers in aggregate lose money as a result of the bill (“contribute to deficit reduction”) and higher-income taxpayers in aggregate gain.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            February 8, 2019 at 1:58 pm

            I was referring to the Tax Policy Center figures. All of the groups they list receive a tax cut initially, and they put their results in terms of what fraction of the total tax reduction each group gets.

    • Plumber says:
      February 7, 2019 at 9:20 pm

      @Jesse E,

      Thanks for the link, that was interesting and unexpected by me.

      As for “much of the current Trumpian base”, if one goes in assuming that, then little persuasion will be accomplished. 

      If someone like Tucker Carlson can come to finally realize and acknowledge that the problems of the inner city aren’t just from “culture” I’m hopeful. 

      The Democratic Party has moved left fast recently (even Chuck Schumer!) while (weirdly) the professional class (especially women) are leaving thr Republicans.

      And the Republican Party?

      That transformation is very interesting, if they’re going to retain the working-class voters they’ve gained I have a hard time believing that just the status quo will cut it for long.

      While the Democrats lost many votes at the time for what was thought to be a too expensive yet ineffective “stimulus” (which went into keeping teachers employed and tax cuts, the infrastructure projects happened too late to sway the 2010 election), and for putting everything into creating Obamacare instead of creating more jobs and stopping the foreclosures, imagine if instead there’d been no Affordable Care Act and instead the “grand bargain to fix entitlements” was done (which thankfully Republican back-benchers kept Boehner from doing with Obama), had that been the case the Democratic Party would have taken decades to recover, if at all, but instead campaigning on what’s left of the welfare state, including the new addition of the ACA saved the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party knows it has to deliver something to keep it’s new voters, I don’t think warmed over Reaganism will suffice. 

      Is it too much to expect them to deliver something like Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system? 

      I can almost imagine both parties  in competition to deliver improvements for the majority! 

      Of course all it will take is some collegiate showboating to “scare the squares” and demonstrate “wokeness” and the Republicans can just get by with verbal hippy-punching while Democrats do the habitual circular firing squads (hint the energy is nice, but please go on a precinct walk to Teamster households wearing a freakin’ nose ring!).

      To me the normal state of affairs should lower and lower middle-class employees in one party and owners and upper middle class professionals in the other, but instead we have the majority of working-class whites plus businesses owners in one party that has slightly more men than women, and the majority of the non-white working-class plus diploma’d professionals in the other party that is slightly more women than men. 

      This baffles me.

      There must be links that I can’t see.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 8, 2019 at 3:29 am

      economically liberal, socially conservative politicians — let’s be blunt and just say “racist populists.”

      So is it only socially conservative, fiscally liberal politicians who are “racist populists” or are we voters who are social conservatives and fiscal liberals racists too? I’d like to know one way or the other, is it worth my while ironing the white bedsheets and getting the lighter fluid out for the cross-burning? Only the weather forecast is giving it fierce windy tonight and I’d rather stay indoors unless it was absolutely politically necessary!

      I hear we’re racists now, Father! (Warning: TV comedy show from the 90s, Governor Northam-levels of problematic cultural imitation).

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        February 8, 2019 at 5:00 am

        Nothing better than taking one pair of emotionally loaded, extremely versatile, non-concrete labels and replacing them with another pair of emotionally loaded, extremely versatile, non-concrete labels.

  40. Nancy Lebovitz says:
    February 7, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A

    This video argues that Democrats have been behaving like cooperebots with the Republicans, and it’s because a lot of Democrats believe that if good procedures are followed, the result will inevitably be a good outcome.

    It strikes me as a fair description of how Supreme Court appointments have been handled lately.

    Anyway, I think there could be some interesting discussion of game theory in the real world, and also of when following the rules makes sense and when it doesn’t.

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      February 7, 2019 at 12:36 pm

      I can’t get past the whining over “refuses to do his job.” Mitch McConnell’s job as the Senate Majority Leader is to decide what things come up for a vote on the floor of the Senate. He decided, “not this.” That is his job, and he did it. He also didn’t let funding for Trump’s wall come up for a vote during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. I don’t hear any whining from the Democrats about McConnell “not doing his job” there.

      ETA: And the monumental hubris to call his own interests and his own side “values neutral.” “My values are so unquestionable they’re all just ‘neutral.'”

      • The Nybbler says:
        February 7, 2019 at 1:13 pm

        Casting one’s policy preferences as an elected official’s or body’s “job” is something that’s been done by the media and pundits for a long time. It’s obnoxious, but it seems to work for them.

        As for the Democrats acting as cooperate-bot… have we forgotten the Kavanaugh hearings already?

        • Randy M says:
          February 7, 2019 at 1:26 pm

          As for the Democrats acting as cooperate-bot… have we forgotten the Kavanaugh hearings already?

          When I do it, it’s a Tit, when you do it, it’s a Tat.

          • The Nybbler says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:11 pm

            Cooperate-bot doesn’t do it at all; if there’s any titting and tatting going on, it’s not from cooperate-bot

          • Randy M says:
            February 7, 2019 at 2:17 pm

            Hmm…. Well, then, what you call a defection was actually the wheels of justice, and if you can’t see it, that’s kind of shady itself, innit?

    • Gobbobobble says:
      February 7, 2019 at 1:07 pm

      Aw man, what a ripoff. It promised “violence, racism, and Nazis being Nazis” but didn’t deliver. Just a bunch of guff about how it’s okay – nay, morally required – to break the rules if you really, really believe you’re right.

    • J Mann says:
      February 7, 2019 at 2:32 pm

      The argument is that Democrats have been unreasonably cooperative about Supreme Court appointments?

      IMHO, the court wars have been an increasing escalation between both sides, but Democrats typically ignore theirs. The Bork wars and Biden’s slowdown of GHWB’s judicial picks are particular offenders.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:50 pm

      The Democrats filibustered Gorsuch, and the GOP nuked it. In what world is this cooperation? It just wasn’t the media spectacle that was Garland or Kavanaugh.

      There’s not much in this video that doesn’t strike me as silly. The GOP is united? Like, did you miss the circus that was the 2016 nomination, let alone the circus that is the GOP House delegation, which ultimately torched both Paul Ryan AND John Boehner? There is massive in-fighting among the GOP, and a lot of GOPers are actually amenable to Democratic policy positions and are possible swing voters, Democrats just aren’t particularly interested in targeting those voters.

      The Democrats have a tough coalition to assemble? They aren’t unified, but this isn’t the Democrats of the 1990s with a substantial Southern coalition. I expect their situation to become worse as the reap what they have sown in terms of radicalizing their own voter base, but right now they are sitting pretty in terms of unity, especially with a figure like Trump to unite them.

      I do agree that I’m not voting for a Democrat under any likely circumstance. The last Democrat I voted for was Pat Quinn in 2010, I don’t think I’ll vote for another one until there is another major party shake-up.

      • BBA says:
        February 7, 2019 at 6:43 pm

        I expect their situation to become worse as the reap what they have sown in terms of radicalizing their own voter base, but right now they are sitting pretty in terms of unity, especially with a figure like Trump to unite them.

        Dood… have you seen what’s been going on in Virginia? Apparently nobody in the party is capable of living up to progressive values – and not even particularly high standards of progressive values at that. And all right, Virginia is just one state with particularly unusual politics, but to me as a committed liberal this doesn’t bode well.

        The US is seemingly drifting into a zero-party system, much like the UK post-Brexit. Both major parties are extremely unpopular, neither has any workable policy ideas, neither would be capable of enacting its policies even if it had any… and yet, somebody has to win the election. This is what I mean by “late democracy.” The only thing worse than it is whatever comes next.

        • suntzuanime says:
          February 7, 2019 at 6:55 pm

          There’s no reason there have to be parties. America was designed to be functional without them. Some people even thought we’d be better off without them. If nobody likes either major party that just creates a power void for McAfee 2020 to fill.

          • Jaskologist says:
            February 7, 2019 at 7:20 pm

            The founders spoke at length against parties. Thomas Jefferson famously said, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

            He formed the Democratic-Republican Party three years later. However the founders intended to design the system, what they actually created was one that consistently stabilizes on 2 major parties.

          • cassander says:
            February 7, 2019 at 7:21 pm

            every democracy and most even vaguely republican political systems have parties. you can’t have a democracy without them, they’re simply too useful a tool for organizing legislatures to have them not exist.

          • suntzuanime says:
            February 7, 2019 at 7:28 pm

            Well, good news, if it consistently stabilizes on 2 major parties, then we’re not drifting into a zero-party system at all and there’s nothing to worry about.

          • BBA says:
            February 8, 2019 at 8:42 pm

            Not really my point. When elections can’t accomplish anything and nobody expects them to, we no longer have a democracy. I know we have some here who welcome that, but I certainly don’t.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:31 pm

          I expect to see more Virginias in the future. Right now, the Democrats do not have the kind of turmoil that characterizes British politics or even the House GOP debacle. But I except that to happen, because the base is further left than the leadership of the party, and that will eventually come to a head.

          Pelosi won her House speakership pretty handily and controls most of the committees with nothing more than token nods to the hard leftists, and Schumer is still leading Senate Democrats.

          • Plumber says:
            February 8, 2019 at 5:52 pm

            @A Definite Beta Guy,

            The Democrats haven’t power yet so nothing recent demonstrates this, but my fear is a repeat of the late 1960’s and ’70’s when it seemed “the New Left” destroyed what had been an ascendant “Liberalism” of the mid-20th century (not 19th century classic liberalism or 1990’s neo-liberalism) chased Johnson out of office, and had the majority of the public look at the likes of the S.L.A. and the Weatherman, go “Nope!”, and turn rightward, destroying the New Deal coalition.

            I can easily imagine collegiate showboating “woke” radical puritan purgists doing the same trick in the 21st century.

            The worst enemy of the Left, is…

            ….Leftists.

      • Joseph Greenwood says:
        February 8, 2019 at 5:52 am

        An aside: it weirds me out how frequently I hear members of the [red, blue] tribe talk about how their opposition is united and powerful and if only people on the True and Good side could come together and stop in-fighting, we could overcome Evil and achieve peace in our time.

        Why is this? Is it wishful thinking? Does the Other label of [blue, red] drown out subtler distinctions? Are both sides accomplishing things (Obamacare, Trump’s tax cuts) and then downplaying their own achievements because they are more aware of how hard they were to manage? What?

        • EchoChaos says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:12 am

          It’s more that it’s easier to see the divisions in your own ranks because you’re attuned to them, I think.

          Plus, there are plenty of fuzzy purple people out there in both parties. So it’s easy to say “If all the fuzzy purple people in my party would put aside their differences and be true [red, blue] then we’d be an overwhelming majority” without realizing the only reason they’re allied with your party is because you aren’t compelling them to be true [red, blue] and if you did you’d lose them.

          • aristides says:
            February 8, 2019 at 6:55 am

            I think this first point is the main one. I can’t tell you the difference between Stalin, Lenin, Moa, or Trotsky’s beliefs and views, only their actions. However, Trump and Ted Cruz seem diametrically opposed to me, with Rubio, Kaisich, and Ryan are even further apart in different directions. It’s easy to see differences in your ingroup , but nearly impossible to see them in the outgroup.

          • Viliam says:
            February 8, 2019 at 3:26 pm

            @aristides
            Recently I read some books to understand the differences between Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, but my conclusion is that this question simply cannot be answered clearly.

            First, because they kept changing their opinions dramatically, i.e. the difference between one’s beliefs at time T and T+1 was much greater than the difference between any two of them at time T; and that is not because they updated a lot, but rather because they lied a lot. (Autonomous workers’ councils, or centralized strong government? Democracy or dictatorship? Peasants: the good guys, or the scum that needs to be stomped upon? Other left-wing parties: cooperate, or murder all members and their families? Minorities: independence, or forced assimilation? — each of these options was Lenin’s official policy at some moment. His only consistent opinions that I noticed were: “Russia should stop being involved in WW1” and “it is better to have a political party of a few extremists, than of many lukewarm members”.) In Soviet Union, you could have been exposed as an enemy of the revolution and sent to death camps for speaking an opinion which a year later happened to become the official policy.

            Second, because a difference in opinion on some theoretical issue was often just a pretext for the actual conflict, which was: who should be the boss. (Who is the second most important person after Lenin: Stalin or Trotsky? At which moment of his declining health should Lenin pass his power to Stalin?)

            Yeah, I know you just mentioned it as an example of “difficult to understand minor differences in the outgroup”, but you happened to choose an example where I doubt that even a fan could provide an ELI5 summary (that other fans would agree with).

          • cassander says:
            February 8, 2019 at 4:29 pm

            @Viliam

            If you judge them based on what they did, not what they said, it becomes a lot clearer.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:19 am

          Outgroup homogeneity bias. “All those Dems are evil commies united in their hatred for ‘Merica and God.” “All those Reps are evil bigots united in their hatred for women and minorities.”

        • Plumber says:
          February 8, 2019 at 9:35 am

          @Joseph Greenwood

          “….Are both sides accomplishing things (Obamacare, Trump’s tax cuts) and then downplaying their own achievements because they are more aware of how hard they were to manage?…”

          I think it was @Conrad Honcho who first provided a link to:

          https://samzdat.com/2017/02/01/on-social-states/

          which seems to explain some of that,

          “….Partisans of both the Left and the Right agree on one thing and one thing only: the enemy is running the country. Both are right, which is why both can produce graphs. The Left is winning the culture war, and the Right is winning the economic war. [5] 5. The history of political hegemony in two graphs:

          Marginal tax rate for highest earners (Right)
          Public opinion on same sex marriage (Left) Naturally, neither side wants to hear this, and I expect many comments telling me why their side is both: a) better but still, b) losing…” 

          which seems essentially correct to me. I’ve seen a lot of polls that indicate that the majority of Americans agree more with Democrats on “economic issues” and with Republicans on “social issues”, and my theory is that a lot of vitriol is because the “base” of both parties is getting half a loaf, but not the half they most want.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:46 am

            Citing top marginal tax rates as evidence on its own should basically be ignored, their knowledge of economics is either minimal or they are intentionally cherry picking to support their position.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:
          February 8, 2019 at 2:33 pm

          Because the world is unfair and everything bad that happens to me is somebody else’s fault. It has nothing to do with me or my views being unpersuasive.

  41. Le Maistre Chat says:
    February 7, 2019 at 1:41 pm

    Some pushback against the “don’t read the plays” school of thought: some of my favorite books are my facsimiles of Edwardian illustrated editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Arthur Rackham – there’s also a Heath Robinson version), The Tempest (Edmund Dulac – also a Rackham version), and Twelfth Night (Heath Robinson). So obviously I don’t think the book format is intrinsically bad.

  42. dick says:
    February 7, 2019 at 2:00 pm

    Any strong pro or con opinions about constructivist learning, and more generally the education ideas of Jean Piaget, for kindergartners and elementary school?

    for those not familiar: Wiki says “There are many flavors of constructivism, but one prominent theorist is Jean Piaget, who focused on how humans make meaning in relation to the interaction between their experiences and their ideas. He considered himself to be a genetic epistemologist, meaning he was interested in the genesis of knowledge. His views tended to focus on human development in relation to what is occurring with an individual as distinct from development influenced by other persons.” The tl;dr seems to be that it involves more group work than solo work, less tests, and generally a more montessori-like approach to letting kids pick their activity.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      February 7, 2019 at 2:22 pm

      I don’t have a strong opinion on the teaching method, just a general skepticism towards educational theories, but using “genetic” in that way should be punishable by caning.

      Picking a name for his school of thought which invites laymen to confuse it with a field of science isn’t just misleading but it hurts the credibility of science in the public mind by associating it with some guy’s idle musings.

      • Alejandro says:
        February 7, 2019 at 6:32 pm

        Piaget developed his theories (and named them) in the first half of the 20th century, when genetics what far less established than it is now, and the etymological meaning of the word as describing origins would have been the primary meaning for most educated people.

        • Nicholas Weininger says:
          February 7, 2019 at 7:31 pm

          Also, French was his native language, no? He may very well have been mentally translating some French term that has a stronger origins-as-opposed-to-genes connotation.

        • Douglas Knight says:
          February 7, 2019 at 8:10 pm

          That was my first thought, but Piaget chose this particular name in 1950 and genetic was pretty well established by then, at least in English. It may have been different in French.

          • albatross11 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:25 am

            Language and common understanding have moved since he published his books.

          • Douglas Knight says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:30 am

            Nope, language moved before he published his books.

          • ilikekittycat says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:39 am

            “Genetic epistemology” is clearly riffing conceptually on what Nietzsche was doing with “Zur Genealogie der Moral” which would have been well known to European intellectuals since 1887

          • A1987dM says:
            February 9, 2019 at 5:08 am

            FWIW, I recently read a nuclear physics paper from the 1970s in English using the word “genetic” in the original sense. At first I thought that was just an extension the metaphor of “parent nuclide” and “daughter nuclide”, then I remembered its etymology.

            (But both for them and for Plaget the ambiguity is most likely unintentional. What really bothers me is when people say e.g. “imaginary” or “positive” in the mathematical or electrical sense but clearly expecting the reader to misunderstand them to mean “in the mind” or “optimistic” respectively (i.e. in statements where if the reader only got the actual meaning they’d probably be like “so what?”).)

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:19 am

        I don’t have a strong opinion on the teaching method, just a general skepticism towards educational theories

        I’m the opposite. I dislike the default “30 kids sit in desks while an adult tells them stuff that will be on the standardized test” approach enough that I’m down to try anything that isn’t clearly worse, so I’m here asking if this stuff is known to be clearly worse.

        • albatross11 says:
          February 8, 2019 at 9:31 am

          There have been so many educational fads that have amounted to either rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or poking holes in a few lifeboats, that my default is to be pretty skeptical of the next educational fad. (In a similar way, I’m moderately against the next war we propose to start a priori–they keep turning out badly enough that a new proposed war will require a fair bit of evidence in its favor before I won’t think it’s a bad idea.).

          I don’t know the educational psychology literature, but my impression is that teacher certification and educational achievement shows basically no correlation with quality of education. And I think much smaller class sizes and one-on-one tutoring both do show some positive impact. But that costs money–perhaps less money, if you’re not requiring your teachers to have a masters in education, but still you’re paying more salaries for the same number of kids. Anyone know more and want to chime in?

          • greenwoodjw says:
            February 8, 2019 at 2:14 pm

            Most educational fads are geared towards obscuring student performance on objective measures (New Math, Whole Word Recognition, Common Core) to present a narrative of “improving schools” without the actual improving part. (My assessment)

            Teacher certification and education is about gatekeeping and controlling supply. There was a study some years ago that found that schools of education were made up of the worst students at their universities, and that the schools were geared to driving out average-intelligence people. My assessment is that the schools of education are controlled by the unions, and the unions have optimized the schools for compliant union members instead of talented educators. The added credential requirements serve the dual purpose of further restricting supply and allowing legislators to claim they are Doing Something about education.

            First-In, Last-Out is also a thing. There was a case in Wisconsin where a New Teacher of the Year recipient was fired because of staff reductions, whereas in NYC abusive teachers are staffed in “rubber rooms” – ie school facilities with no students because they can’t be trusted with children. (The Wisconsin thing actually helped push Act 10 into reality)

            I’m convinced that the current educational model is optimized to maximize dues-paying members of the educational unions and not student achievement. Student achievement only matters where 1) parents are politically active and 2) The schools are not insulated from political pressure. Then it needs to be good enough to avoid political pressure to strip them of control.

    • Viliam says:
      February 7, 2019 at 4:09 pm

      The description in Wikipedia is too abstract for this late hour. I would like to see a simplified version with examples in style “Piaget believed X, as opposed to his opponents who believed Y”, where X and Y would be simple statements using common language.

      My impression from the text was that Piaget believed that children gradually unlock various “mental skills”, largely as a consequence of gaining physical skills. And because physical skills for little kids come more or less predictably at certain age, so do the corresponding mental skills. Maybe. (It would be nice to have a list of the physical skills and corresponding mental skills; and perhaps specific predictions about disabled people.)

      My reaction: Not sure what exactly Piaget was arguing against. Was the previous (implicit) belief that all skills develop linearly during the child’s life, and Piaget was the first one to say: “actually, it’s more like until some moment the child doesn’t use this skill at all… then in some situation has the first successful-ish experience… and encouraged by the success experiments with the same thing over and over again… and in a relatively short time, the child learns to use the skill well“?

      Because, yes, this is what I observe as a parent. Small children develop in “jumps”. If you observe the child all the time, you will notice the intermediate steps, but from a position of a grandma who hasn’t seen the child for a week or two, the skill just magically appeared overnight. Like, at first the child seems unable to grasp the idea that you need to put the Lego brick with its empty side down, and just drops it randomly… and the child is stuck at this level for months… and then at some moment you look and the child already built a tower five bricks tall, and does it repeatedly.

      On the other hand, is this fundamentally different from e.g. not knowing Python programming for twenty years, and then writing recursive code after another month? It just means that skills only start developing after we start actually training them. They are not developing automatically, just because we get older. — So maybe this was Piaget’s main message, dunno.

      But also, Piaget connects specific skills to specific ages. (Which would go against my example with Python; not everyone learns Python when they are twenty.) It is possible that with kids, things like talking and walking are prerequisites for some mental skills, and that talking or walking develop predictably at certain age, which makes the corresponding mental skills also predictable. But this would only apply to things that “everyone does” (in given culture).

      First, we would need the specific table of physical and mental skills, to verify the correspondence. Specifically, we would have to observe physically gifted or disabled kids, and mentally gifted or disabled kids, to verify that if a physical skill comes significantly sooner or later than usual, the corresponding mental skill also does.

      Second, we need to be careful not to apply this theory blindly also to things “not everyone does”, such as chess skills. (Or perhaps rationality.) The timing of such skills will rather depend on when the child had the first opportunity to use them; with physical skills perhaps determining the minimum age. (And we can stimulate the child to grow faster by giving it the proper environment and toys… which leads us to Montessori pedagogics.)

      tl;dr — my understanding of Piaget is that human mental skills are a “tech tree” which also includes some physical skills as prerequisites; and those physical skills unlock at predictable age, which makes certain other nodes of the tree also age-predictable

      • Douglas Knight says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:33 pm

        Why should there be opponents? Most curriculum design is out of habit, without any opinion on how learning works.

        • albatross11 says:
          February 8, 2019 at 3:30 pm

          Last year my son took precalc from a teacher who’d been teaching the subject for about 30 years. The county recently imposed a new curriculum on the class (I think under the influence of common core), which the teacher was required to follow.

          The teacher very clearly thought the new curriculum was idiotic. And a 30-year veteran math teacher is a genuine expert on the matter. I doubt my son’s teacher has a detailed academic theory of how learning works, but I think he has a really, really good mental model of how kids do or don’t learn the specific bits of math he teaches, from decades of experience, and thus what order it makes the most sense to teach things in.

      • Art Vandelay says:
        February 7, 2019 at 4:58 pm

        My understanding of his theory is that at it’s most basic, doing always precedes formal understanding in learning. So counting comes before a concept of numbers, or — for an example relevant to much of the commentariat here — if you want to code, you need to build things and then work out why they work.

        • Joseph Greenwood says:
          February 8, 2019 at 5:38 am

          For what it is worth, this is a reasonably accurate description of how I learn math.

          I read about a new concept (say, the p-adic numbers), and then practice doing simple things with them (taking valuations of rational numbers, adding and multiplying, applying Hensel’s lemma, whatever) and after I have a little hands-on familiarity I go back to learning the theory. Of course, in pure math this can be obfuscated somewhat by the fact that “working with an object” sometimes means “proving things about it.”

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:32 am

        I think the tl;dr would be that it inverts the normal didactic model – instead of the teacher telling the student something and then asking them to repeat it, the teacher asks the student first, and then discusses the answer as a way of teaching them about it.

        It’s also closely related to the “storylines” method of teaching, which involves constructing narratives around facts to make them more memorable – instead of “today I’m going to tell you about Mars”, “Today we’re going to make up a story together about a space explorer and what they discover”. But I’m not sure if that’s an integral part of Constructivism or just another approach that is sometimes used by the same people.

  43. MrApophenia says:
    February 7, 2019 at 2:51 pm

    General consensus is supposed to be John LeCarre, right? He actually was a British spy through much of the 50s and 60s, who started writing spy novels while still working for British intelligence, which were quite unusual at the time for the degree to which they portray intelligence work as not just morally messy, but also ultimately as a kind of banal, bureaucratic job much like any other government job a lot of the time. His most famous spy protagonist, George Smiley, is a pudgy, unassuming civil servant who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag but is very good at the actual work of spycraft.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:41 pm

      Le Carre’s early books are quite good at capturing the atmosphere and the technical details of British Intelligence in the 50s and early 60s, from the perspective of a former insider disillusioned with and very critical of the Cold War. The insider knowledge that tempers the grinding of that particular axe is less accurate and less relevant the later in his body of work you go, so things veer away from accuracy there, though in different ways than Ian Fleming or Vince Flynn. I would take everything after The Looking Glass War with increasingly large measures of salt as far as both realism and insight goes.

      To be clear, I recommend him in general as a good writer, though I personally am a lot less fond of pretty much everything after “Smiley’s People”.

    • Tarpitz says:
      February 7, 2019 at 5:42 pm

      Yeah, start by reading the Smiley books (including Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which only features Smiley as a supporting character, but is both integral to the ongoing plot and utterly brilliant; omitting A Murder of Quality if you feel like it, because although Smiley is the main character it’s kind of just a standalone detective story).

      So that’s:

      Call for the Dead
      (A Murder of Quality)
      The Spy who Came in from the Cold
      Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
      The Honourable Schoolboy
      Smiley’s People
      (A Legacy of Spies – not really necessary, but kind of a nice coda)

      You won’t regret it.

      • spkaca says:
        February 8, 2019 at 2:05 am

        Call for the Dead
        (A Murder of Quality)
        The Spy who Came in from the Cold

        Yes to these, but the later books are weaker – the same amount of plot stretched to ten times the length. I ended up skim-reading TTSS and Smiley’s People, dipping in every 10 pages or so to see if anything had happened (usually it hadn’t).

        • Tarpitz says:
          February 9, 2019 at 8:05 am

          Matter of taste, I suppose. I love both Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People, but they certainly aren’t as lean as the earlier books.

  44. Nornagest says:
    February 7, 2019 at 3:09 pm

    Whether a particular take is realistic for its period, needs to take into account that Western spycraft changed hugely around the time of the early Cold War. In WWII, Western spying revolved around ad-hoc military organizations like the OSS, most of which were formed during or shortly before the war and basically all of which were making stuff up as they went along. Agents were given a pretty long leash, and the line between spying and special forces action was blurry. It was immature in every sense and often ended up being a playground for adventurers and con artists. Postwar, though, Western spies were spun off into separate, civilian branches of government, grew much more organized, shed most of their military associations and were generally brought to heel.

    Ian Fleming’s background was WWII-era — he never did field work but was attached to British naval intelligence from 1939. His writing was highly dramatized, reflects a secondhand point of view, and often had elements of power fantasy to it, but, in a World War II context, it wouldn’t have been quite as unrealistic as it’s generally thought to be. It is, however, badly out of place for its nominal Cold War setting.

  45. brad says:
    February 7, 2019 at 5:11 pm

    https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f

    This is quite spicy! Methinks some lawyers are going to be hauled in front of bar committees over this one.

    • John V says:
      February 7, 2019 at 7:07 pm

      Mr. Pecker threatens to publish dick pics… nominative determinism strikes again

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:05 am

        Apparently a number of papers went with “Bezos Exposes Pecker,” which ought to win a trophy for concision.

    • jgr314 says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:00 am

      What do you think is the bar ethics violation in this case? I don’t know this area of law in detail, but think this is pretty well trodden ground for AMI. Also, very quick check of 18 USC Ch 40 suggests that this doesn’t meet the conditions for (a federal claim of) extortion or blackmail: link text

      Which is not to say I support AMI at all, I’m just curious about the technicalities of the potential claims and remedies for Bezos.

      • J Mann says:
        February 8, 2019 at 6:46 am

        I’m not an expert, but the question would seem to be whether the statement AMI was seeking was a “thing of value” or “valuable thing” under 18 USC 873 and 875(d). There’s a brief discussion of the issue in US v. Hobgood, ultimately concluding that a valuable but non-property based concession can support an extortion charge.

        (Another issue whether the negotiations were structured in a way to avoid extortion – it’s theoretically possible to say: “Your client claims that my client can’t publish the dick pics because of copyright, we disagree. My client claims your client is defaming him, you disagree. How about we settle both issues.” On the other hand, it’s probably not OK to say “We have dick pics – if you don’t shut up, we’ll publish them.”)

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:08 am

        Is it legal to threaten to publish stolen pictures of someone’s dick? I’m not clear on how that isn’t revenge porn.

        Also, isn’t it possible for lawyers to be censured for something technically legal, if enough people agree that it’s appalling and un-lawyerlike?

    • Conrad Honcho says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:15 am

      1) I sincerely hope Bezos prevails because I do not want to live in a world where there is any chance I will open up a news story and see provocative photos of an unclad Jeff Bezos.

      2) The owner of the Washington Post accusing anyone else of abusing “journalism” for political purposes is extremely rich.

      • mendax says:
        February 8, 2019 at 6:34 am

        2) The owner of the Washington Post accusing anyone else of abusing “journalism” for political purposes is extremely rich.

        Indeed, he is.

      • Randy M says:
        February 8, 2019 at 7:03 am

        1) I sincerely hope Bezos prevails because I do not want to live in a world where there is any chance I will open up a news story and see provocative photos of an unclad Jeff Bezos.

        You especially don’t want that in your browser history when you go to Amazon and they give you recommendations for Valentines day gifts.

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:12 am

        What has Bezos/WaPo done that is comparable to what the National Inquirer is being accused of?

        • albatross11 says:
          February 8, 2019 at 3:38 pm

          I’m glad Bezos did the “publish and be damned” thing. I wonder how often newspaper coverage is affected by this kind of blackmail. If Bezos had caved, then I suppose he could have managed to cause the investigation into AMI to stop and stories about AMI to cease to be written.

          In an ideal world, a prosecutor charging these guys for blackmail would require they disclose all the times they had done this in the past–not the specific blackmail material, but what news outlets and what stories were suppressed as a result.

      • Reasoner says:
        February 9, 2019 at 12:56 am

        I don’t think the Washington Post is that bad. Some of their culture war articles have been remarkably evenhanded and thoughtful, for instance.

    • Deiseach says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:06 am

      I thought this was common practice for tabloids? Ring up the victim and say “we’re going to run a story about you anyway, so give us an exclusive interview or else we’ll make you look like Jack the Ripper, your choice”?

      Granted, that’s UK tabloids which have been reined in a bit recently, but are American tabloids (or indeed newspapers in general) much more ethical than that? Bezos is rich enough, and has his own media organ to boot so he can fight them on that front, to be able to fight back which is what takes it outside of the run of the mill ‘celeb versus redtop’ tussle.

      I really, really do NOT want to see pictures of Jeff Bezos in the nude, near-nude or indeed anymore than I can help even fully-clothed; I saw one of him above an article on this which, whether it was an unfortunate angle or not, made him look like he had a giraffe’s neck. So I’m in support of “no please do not publish even pixellated pics of Little Jeff poking out through the zipper of his shorts”. On the other hand, if he’s in the middle of a divorce and affair with a married woman, then he should be expecting prurient media interest of exactly this kind, and however those got leaked (from his side, the mistress’ side, or the spurned wife’s side) it was damn careless.

      I have seen some speculation that the divorce talks have turned sour and this is the soon to be ex-wife getting some retaliation in first by leaking these, anyone got any opinions on that?

      • Randy M says:
        February 8, 2019 at 8:29 am

        I have seen some speculation that the divorce talks have turned sour and this is the soon to be ex-wife getting some retaliation in first by leaking these, anyone got any opinions on that?

        Only that I find my sympathy varies significantly depending of if these pictures were sent to the ex-wife earlier in the marriage or as a propositioning of his fling.
        Still with you and Conrad in not wanting to wanting to not see them.

        • Deiseach says:
          February 8, 2019 at 4:47 pm

          Only that I find my sympathy varies significantly depending of if these pictures were sent to the ex-wife earlier in the marriage or as a propositioning of his fling.

          Like I said, Randy M, it’s all rumours and speculation and probably about as true as “leprechauns with pots of gold at the end of the rainbow” but how I saw it put was that the wife found these on his phone and leaked them out of “so see how you like this, buster” motivations. I don’t want to know the juicy details of the grubby scandal so I have no idea how the news of the fling was broken: did he tell her “Honey, I’ve found a new love” or did she find out by accident or what, but it does seem like he was carrying on with Mrs Next Door while both were still married to their respective spouses before any periods of “loving exploration and trial separation” happened, so presumably there was some evidence of naughtiness to be found lying around if Soon To Be Ex-Mrs Bezos went looking for it or stumbled over it (people do seem to be remarkably stupid about their affairs when they’re in the pink hazy throes of romance and think they’re being a lot cleverer and more discreet than they are in fact).

      • John Schilling says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:21 am

        Granted, that’s UK tabloids which have been reined in a bit recently, but are American tabloids (or indeed newspapers in general) much more ethical than that?

        My understanding is that this used to be common in the 1920s through roughly 1970s, with local “scandal sheets” that specialized in such behavior, but that the National Enquirer and a few others of its ilk tried to position themselves a step or two higher on the respectability ladder than that and the ones with literal blackmail as a business model mostly went away for reasons I don’t understand.

        And I think AMI sank to that level in this case not because they wanted to take up that business model, but wanted some leverage in an existing political/legal dispute with Bezos.

        • albatross11 says:
          February 11, 2019 at 6:44 am

          I’m trying to imagine the feeling you get when:

          a. You see that your blackmail attempt has failed so spectacularly.

          b. You see that a likely crime you were involved in has been publicized.

          c. You realize you’ve made a lifelong implacable enemy out of the richest man in the world, who also owns a high-prestige, high-circulation newspaper.

    • toastengineer says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:41 pm

      Twitter seems to think this whole thing is some kind of 4-dimensional chess ploy by Trump to interfere with some kind of investigation targeting him. Anyone know if there’s any truth to that?

      • suntzuanime says:
        February 8, 2019 at 8:48 pm

        Given that Twitter seems to think literally every single event that occurs is some kind of 4-dimensional chess ploy by Trump to interfere with some kind of investigation targeting him, I wouldn’t put too much stock in it without more details.

        • albatross11 says:
          February 11, 2019 at 6:46 am

          Can we point to other examples of Trump playing 4-dimensional chess and having it pay off for him? That sure doesn’t look like what happened in the nomination and election–he was scarily effective there and wiped the floor with a bunch of seasoned professional politicians, but he didn’t seem to do it by machiavellian scheming.

  46. sfoil says:
    February 7, 2019 at 5:54 pm

    This is very open-ended, but I’m asking because I’m not much of an economist. What’s the deal with “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT)? This is triggered by a thread Noah Smith posted on Twitter about the “Green New Deal”. I don’t want to focus on the Green New Deal, but rather on the fact that apparently it relies on MMT-based monetary policies. My impression is basically that MMT is at best an intellectual cover for abandoning the idea of economic scarcity without admitting to such an obviously-false idea, and at worst an attempt to declare that there is no such thing as private property.

    Based on reading Wikipedia, some of Scott Sumner’s criticism of MMT (e.g.), and picking things up here and there over the years, MMT appears on a fundamental level to be the idea that fiscal constraints on (United States) government spending simply don’t exist because of the government’s monopoly on the supply of currency. There seems to be a bit of what around here is called the motte-and-bailey, where the motte involves some true but counterintuitive facts about fiat currency to the effect that only inflation limits government spending, and massive government projects like the Green New Deal won’t trigger excessive inflation based on various fairly reasonable arguments. The bailey is that the very idea of things costing money is simply error, mostly based on obsolete thinking about commodity-backed currency but maybe created and maintained with malicious intent.

    The reason I’m so suspicious of MMT is that the main corollary of this line of thinking appears to be that the US government is in possession of an infinite cookie jar, and if we just stop pretending that there’s only so many cookies to go around then Mommy can reach into the jar and give me a cookie whenever I want one.

    Other corollaries appear to be that actually, non-government entities including individual citizens don’t “have money”; rather, the government has temporarily loaned out some tickets called dollars, which it can take back whenever it wants via taxes. Taxes under MMT have zero relation to government revenue since the state raises revenue by printing money. In fact, “government revenue” is a misnomer, a category error: there are simply things the government does. Taxes under MMT basically exist solely to redistribute currency among non-government holders.

    Some MMT proponents suggest that this model is simply a description of what already happens, and MMT based policies apply this description in advantageous ways, sort of like how alternating current lowers power line transmission impedance in a not-very-intuitive way. I am deeply suspicious of such arguments, which strike me as assuming the premises. As an example, this article written as part of the “Green New Deal” media push by someone I’ve never heard of but who claims a lot of high-status credentials. While he actually does make a few good or at least worth-looking-into points, to me this editorial just about reeks of brimstone– from its lecturing and mocking tone, its casual strawmanning of certain policies, and its suspiciously-naive but highly insistent identification of the federal government (which owns all money, remember) with “citizenry”. And I link it because it’s not the first MMT-supportive article that raises my hackles this way, just the most recent one I’ve read.

    Am I being uncharitable to MMT in thinking that it is a “free lunch” philosophy? Am I right about what MMT says but not giving enough credit to evidence that these things might be true? Is it a basically sensible economic theory being abused by ideologues?

    • Eric Rall says:
      February 7, 2019 at 6:53 pm

      I looked into this relatively recently. From what I gather, the “free lunch” interpretation comes from wishful thinking on the part of casual onlookers. It sounds like MMT is more of reversed re-framing of standard monetary theory.

      In standard monetary theory, fiat currency is issued by the central bank, mostly by issuing loans or buying bonds. The activities of private banks piggy-backs on the “base money” issued by the central bank to create more money in the form of bank balances, but this too is supervised and regulated by the central bank. Inflation and deflation are driven by the central bank issuing too much or too little money respectively relative to the size of the real economy. Fiscal policy (taxing, borrowing, and spending by the political branches of government) can have an effect on the real economy (more spending can be either helpful (stimulating the economy) or harmful (crowding out private sector activity), depending on the policies in question, the state of the economy at the time, and which economists you ask) which can indirectly drive inflation or deflation, but under most circumstances the central bank is able to compensate by varying how much money is being created and put into circulation.

      In an environment when the central bank is given a mandate of maintaining a constant nominal interest rate (instead of the current mandate of maintaining a low, steady rate of inflation), deficit spending can lead to inflation (by bidding up interest rates, which the central bank must issue more money in order to bid down), while a fiscal surplus does the opposite.

      MMT takes more-or-less the same activity, but re-characterizes it using a different reading convention. In the MMT model, it’s primarily fiscal policy that puts money into and takes money out of circulation, but deficit spending to a first approximation doesn’t matter because because borrowing is just a different mechanism (parallel to taxation) for taking money out of circulation. The central bank’s role, in MMT, is mostly to regulate the interest rate environment in light of government borrowing: the central bank’s policies can offset borrowing (by doing what standard monetary theory would characterize as issuing money) so the borrowing doesn’t take money out of circulation, or the central bank can raise interest rates to maintain a balance of money being created and destroyed.

      Both frameworks more-or-less describe the same things and mostly make the same predictions (e.g. a central bank policy designed to hold interest rates constant while the government spends tons of borrowed money will tend to lead to inflation), but they characterize them in different terms: in SMT, the central bank is issuing money to finance the deficit, while in MMT, it’s the treasury that’s issuing money while the central bank fails to offset the inflationary effects by raising interest rates. This similarity of predictions is where the claim that “Where MMT is true, it isn’t interesting” comes from.

      The other half of that saying, that “where MMT is interesting, it isn’t true”, probably comes from people who missed the significance of the central bank’s role in MMT. As I described it, “deficit spending to a first approximation doesn’t matter”, but it actually does matter once you look at the second-order effects policies the central bank would need to implement to offset the deficit spending. But if you miss the “to a first approximation” part, you get free lunch claims that are very interesting but completely untrue.

      It’s kinda like the misunderstandings of the Laffer Curve from the other side of the aisle: it’s generally accepted as trivially true that extremely high tax rates and extremely low tax rates both produce almost no revenue (because they tax the activity out of existence in the former case, and because the tax itself is almost nothing in the latter), which higher amounts of revenue can be raise by a tax rate in the middle. Over-eager conservative/libertarian politicians overextended this by imagining that it made any and all plausible tax cuts a free lunch, not just cuts from a very high tax rate to a more moderate one.

      • Guy in TN says:
        February 7, 2019 at 8:28 pm

        This is a good informative write-up, thanks Eric.

      • baconbits9 says:
        February 8, 2019 at 8:18 am

        Yes but no. This explanation is internally coherent but doesn’t describe how CBs actually work, and the outlandish predictions of MMT allowing the Federal government a free lunch actually work themselves out of missing these details.

        First is the misunderstanding that CBs set interest rates, they don’t they target interest rates under specific conditions. Take the Federal Funds Rate, the FFR is a target for the price that banks charge each other for overnight lending without collateral, and the Fed adjusts toward this target through Open Market Operations (OMO). OMO basically work by shifting the need for overnight borrowing and the supply of funds available for overnight lending, if the Fed has a 2% target and borrowing costs are higher then they print money (digitally now) and purchase securities from banks. This increases the amount of cash within the banking system and decreases the amount of securities, and if the rate is to low they do the opposite with the opposite effect. However the lack of collateral means that there can be divergence between the Federal Funds Rate and the actual inter-bank lending rate, and if you look at the graph linked you will see a series of spikes in the inter-bank rate that occur with destabilizing events like 9/11, Bear Stearns having issues, the collapse of Lehman Brothers etc.

        This combination has two major implications. First is that the Fed can either target the interest rate, and adjust the monetary base in response to the demands of the market or they can target the monetary base and let the interest rate fall where it may based on the demands of the market. The second is that the Fed controls neither during a crisis through the Federal Funds rate and that the market will break away from the target rate with enough pressure.

        To jump forward a little what you have with a fiat system is a combination of repression and permission from the markets. All fiat systems have some level of repression built in, preventing the creation of competing currencies or banking institutions is basically a given, but if you aren’t going for full on repression then the market is going to be setting prices and that is the breaking point for MMT.

    • JPNunez says:
      February 8, 2019 at 7:58 am

      There’s no free lunch. Cookies from the magic jar actually fill you up and provide some nutrition. Money at best can be burned for heat, at worst it is a bunch of bits in some computer. Sure, it can be exchanged for goods and services, but how many? That depends on the market value of money.

      It’s not that the government can take money away via taxes. It’s that the only reason we value the american dollar, japanese yen, or whatever sovereign money is that the american/japanese/whatever government is creating demand for it via the threat of charging taxes at the end of the fiscal year. If you are an american citizen, you know you gotta pay taxes around April, so you better get ahold of some of those sweet sweet dollars somehow. The whole idea of “fiat money” having value because the market and supply and demand is bunk. The dollar has value because Uncle Sam demands some of them each year or it will take away your house and send you to prison. Yes, yes, taxation is theft, we all know. We also know what a true fiat money looks like. Bitcoin has no taxes, and only some new bitcoins can be created. Turns out bitcoin is extremely volatile compared to sovereign currencies.

      Second thing is that when the government wants to purchase goods or services, it has two alternatives. It may issue debt to recover dollars, or it may print money. MMT does not say that you _have_ to print money, only that it is an alternative. Current american government only has one option, debt.

      The other thing is that, to keep the economy running close to full capacity, you need to make unemployment disappear. MMT proposes a job guarantee to combat this, where the government will give you a job at a given wage -probably close to minimum wage-. Thus anyone who really wants a job can get one, but it is not a great job. People will move on to a better job as soon as they can get one, and the government will just stop paying them. The government may even adjust the guaranteed job wage as it needs to control inflation -remember, low unemployment will drive inflation up normally-. Do note that the job guarantee is not a guarantee that you will get a good job at a salary you like where you like.

      It is interesting that MMT is becoming popular right now. My theory is that the current american economy is reflecting quasi-MMT. Trump gave a tax cut and didn’t raise taxes, thus increasing the deficit and helping the economy. The gig economy is taking the role of the job guarantee somewhat. Some of those jobs are being financed by venture capitals hoping to get a return some day, but if they don’t, they will have basically burned away their money, in a way that _resemble_ taxes. The problem is that the deficit IS debt, and those interests will have to be paid by the US government, and that the gig economy may collapse if VC decides the investment is not ever paying back and decides to put their money elsewhere -potentially driving up inflation without lowering unemployment-.

      I see some problems with implementing MMT. I think the biggest one that is not discussed much, is that the job guarantee wage may become a political instead of a technical decision. Other is that international banks qualify countries partially by their deficit, and MMT just saying that some deficit is alright may hurt them for no reason. Problems with runaway inflation are well known.

      There’s no free lunch; MMT will try to keep a country running at full capacity, but it is not without risks.

      edit: something else that’s not a free lunch. The government, even with their money printing machine running full tilt, cannot really buy stuff that does not exist. Bernie Sanders cannot promise to give a trip to Mars to all americans, simply because there aren’t enough rockets or fuel or pilots, or installations. And America can’t probably even build enough. But he can promise “free”* college to every student, because the colleges and teachers exist right now. It’s just that private citizens are paying for them. MMT doesn’t change this fact. If the Green New Deal promoters promise to pay for whatever using MMT, the question of free lunch is whether whatever they promise is buyable, whether it actually exist, or the capacity to built the promised stuff exists.

      *it is not free, obviously, it has to be paid for somehow. The question is whether the way it is paid for is efficient politically agreeable or not.

      • Randy M says:
        February 8, 2019 at 8:18 am

        The whole idea of “fiat money” having value because the market and supply and demand is bunk. The dollar has value because Uncle Sam demands some of them each year or it will take away your house and send you to prison.

        That’s an interesting thought. Good Ironic riposte to the libertarian critique.
        “What do you mean, the government creates no value? Apparently you don’t value fear quite highly enough.”

    • Urstoff says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:22 am

      It’s hard not to see it as a theory people believe because it would make their political goals easier to implement.

      • ilikekittycat says:
        February 8, 2019 at 10:41 am

        As opposed to all those proponents of economic systems at odds with their political goals, making them less likely to be implemented

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:39 am

      I’m not very well-versed in economics, but one thing that I never understood about the policies supported by MMT proponents is why any same person would keep using dollars under those circumstances.

      If the government is explicitly going to inflate or tax away any earnings or wealth denominated in dollars, then the very first thing that anyone with sense is going to do is to sell as many dollars as possible in favor of cryptocurrency, commodities and commodity-backed currencies like electronic gold, or foreign currencies. You’d need to keep some dollars for show, but the dollar would be more like the Venezuelan Bolivar or the Cuban National Peso: a currency of last resort, valuable only to the extent that the government can punish you for using anything else as money.

      To the extent that the dollar is being manipulated in a way which reduces it’s value as a medium of exchange and a store of value, people will find alternative mediums of exchange and stores of value. Not perfectly, of course, but even the most repressive socialist governments in history haven’t been able to stamp out their black market currencies.

      • JPNunez says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:16 am

        But in real life the government is already taxing away your earnings and you still don’t switch to bitcoin fully.

        Taxes are still going to be charged, so you will still need dollars. Conversely, people hired by the government, or who sell products to the government will have dollars in their pockets, so if you wish to do any kind of commerce with them, you will need to accept dollars, even if it is as trivial as splitting a bill with them and receiving some money in the exchange.

        Something interesting about MMT is that it means that it would be incredibly dangerous for any country to start accepting taxes in bitcoin (and conversely, extremely desirable for bitcoin fans to make their governments to accept bitcoin as taxes directly). AFAIK the few instances that do use an intermediary. It seems Ohio does, which is double dumb as Ohio cannot actually print its own money. MMT only works on the sovereign level.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          February 8, 2019 at 9:37 am

          You missed the emphasis in my sentence.

          Taxes are obnoxious but after taxes I still end up keeping most of my own money, enough that it makes more sense to keep collecting my salary in dollars instead of hawking trinkets to tourists in exchange for their Euros or Yuan. At the end of the day, dollars are still useful for consumption in the present and investment in the future so I’ll keep working to obtain more of them.

          If government policy is to start issuing trillion-dollar bills and/or levying confiscatory taxes to pay for job guarantees and the like, that logic changes substantially. At that point, it makes more sense to leave the country or, if that’s not possible, to sell my labor on the black market for more useful currencies. Maybe I’d need to work a “guaranteed” job on the side to keep up appearances and stay out of prison, but the dollars that job would pay wouldn’t be useful for any of the things that I actually use money for.

          • JPNunez says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:18 am

            That’s doubtful, given how America constantly invests in new wars, with trillion dollars bills, and yet you still haven’t switched to bitcoins.

          • Guy in TN says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:32 am

            If government policy is to start issuing trillion-dollar bills and/or levying confiscatory taxes to pay for job guarantees and the like, that logic changes substantially. At that point, it makes more sense to leave the country or, if that’s not possible, to sell my labor on the black market for more useful currencies.

            You might find this to be grounds to leave the country, but other people might find it be a reason to immigrate to that country. For example, a country with high inflation is a good place to immigrate to if most of your wealth is in non-monetary assets.

            As for turning to the black market, its true that high taxes incentivize this more than low taxes, but the illegality aspect acts as a countering disincentive. With strong enough law enforcement, we can push the costs of doing illegal activity to be quite high.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:49 am

            @JPNunez,

            Maybe I’ve misunderstood but I’m pretty sure that the money spent on America’s various wars was borrowed with the intent to eventually pay them off with money from tax revenues.

            MMT advocates borrowing money and then paying the nominal value by printing money. That’s less like our current deficit spending and more like the spending habits of Weimar Republic or the various present-day failed socialist states.

            @Guy in TN,

            Are you prepared to endorse “stronger law enforcement” than Cuba or Venezuela? Those countries aren’t exactly known for their tremendous leniency yet clearly aren’t able to enforce themselves out of this problem.

            Historically, the case is even worse. I don’t see the US ever exceeding the USSR or the DDR in law enforcement and neither was able to punish their way out of this problem.

          • Nornagest says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:14 am

            a country with high inflation is a good place to immigrate to if most of your wealth is in non-monetary assets.

            It’s not as bad as it would be if all your wealth was in cash, but it’s not doing you any favors, either. Inflation doesn’t make your wealth any more valuable in real terms, it just makes the numbers for it bigger — and, if it’s high enough, it can make it harder to convert parts of your wealth into things you actually want. If you want to sell a house, you expect it to take a few months to close, and your country’s undergoing Seventies-like inflation (~10%), then the sticker price on that house is worth appreciably less at the end than it was at the beginning.

          • JPNunez says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:23 am

            @Nabil ad Dajjal

            MMT does not advocate _only_ printing money. Bonds will still be issued, they just won’t be the only source of money. In the end, the government, and thus its people, still need to pay at least the interests on the issued debt. And economists will point out that said debt cannot be defaulted because…the government can always print money to pay for them. Thus going back to the original problem.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:02 pm

            @JPNunez,

            Ok, so say that the Federal government announced tomorrow that this was the new plan. From now on, Treasury Bonds will either be paid off through issuing new bonds or by printing an amount of money equal to their nominal value. Would you be more or less likely to invest in Treasury Bonds upon hearing that announcement?

            If it’s impossible for the government to default on its debt, the buy / don’t buy decision boils down to your perception of interest rate risk. Basically, the interest on the bond needs to be higher than inflation by a large enough margin to justify putting money in Treasury Bonds instead of buying gold or Bitcoins or wampum.

            Well, the government just announced that they’re going to inflate their way out of paying bonds if people stop buying them. So that question is pretty much answered: if you’re stuck holding the bag when other people stop buying government bonds, they’ve promised to wipe out your profit.

            That means that nobody with any sense is going to lend to Uncle Sam and the dollar drops in value. Which means that people will try to sell their dollars, leading to a greater drop in value. Etc, etc.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:53 pm

            Ok, so say that the Federal government announced tomorrow that this was the new plan. From now on, Treasury Bonds will either be paid off through issuing new bonds or by printing an amount of money equal to their nominal value. Would you be more or less likely to invest in Treasury Bonds upon hearing that announcement?

            This has been the de facto policy of the US government for nearly 70 years.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:56 pm

            You might find this to be grounds to leave the country, but other people might find it be a reason to immigrate to that country. For example, a country with high inflation is a good place to immigrate to if most of your wealth is in non-monetary assets.

            Oh man no its not.

          • Guy in TN says:
            February 8, 2019 at 8:12 pm

            You make a good point Nornagest, but I do see a positional advantage from a business perspective of moving into a market where every other business’s wealth is evaporating but yours is not. But yes, all else equal you would see no gain in value.

            But there’s also the question of what government is going to do with this shifting of wealth (e.g. job guarantee), which could also be attractive to immigration.

      • baconbits9 says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:21 am

        This is a common complaint against MMT that actually has a ready answer. Purchasing power of individual dollars doesn’t matter as almost no dollars are held as cash on hand. Losing 2% or even 10% of a dollars nominal value in a year is no big deal if 95%+ of your dollars are in a bank account whose interest rate is >= the inflation rate (realistically it can be lower as long as those losses are less than the transaction costs of moving to another currency.

        As an example the US has inflated away the value of a dollar consistently over the last century + and yet almost no one has abandoned the dollar.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          February 8, 2019 at 9:58 am

          The interest rate on savings has been lower than inflation for my entire adult lifetime, so it’s a bit of a nonsequitor to even bring it up.

          The more relevant factor is the opportunity cost of transitioning to a different currency. The cost isn’t trivial, but it isn’t so high that it’s a license to print money. There’s a reason why I mentioned the Bolivar and the National Peso; this switch to black-market money is something that actually happens when governments print too much money.

          When people talk about MMT here and in the media, the numbers they talk about are huge. AOC’s Green New Deal for example is supposed to cost $2 trillion over a decade, roughly one fifth of the entire world’s supply of dollars. Paying for that by printing money means cutting the value of a dollar by 20% on top of existing inflation, which looks like approximately doubling it based playing with an inflation calculator.

          If a $1 today is worth 60¢ instead of 80¢ in ten years, that changes the math on a lot of decisions about what I do today.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          February 8, 2019 at 10:07 am

          The site ate my reply: I may have stumbled across a banned word.

          While the cost of switching currencies is non-trivial, the examples I gave of the National Peso and the Bolivar prove that it can and does happen even in extraordinarily repressive states with strict capital controls. Inflate the currency enough and it doesn’t matter how brutal your punishments for using the wrong currency are.

          MMT proponents like to mock the fear of inflation and extol the virtues of printing money to pay for extravagant social programs. That doesn’t fill me with confidence that they’re going to carefully manage the money supply and avoid hyperinflation.

          • JPNunez says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:22 am

            MMT relies on the assumption that the stuff you want to pay for is actually sold, priced in the currency you print.

            Venezuela nor Cuba are not in that case.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:50 pm

            Your examples prove the ability of a country to ruin its currency, but not that simply printing money will ruin it.

          • John Schilling says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:04 pm

            So what are the examples MMT proponents can point to, showing a government greatly increasing its ability(*) to pay for real stuff by printing money, without ruining its currency?

            * Beyond that achieved by collecting taxes and taking on real debt.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 9, 2019 at 5:08 am

            @ John Schilling

            Japan.

    • Paul Brinkley says:
      February 8, 2019 at 3:08 pm

      An aside: how often does the term inflation refer to the increase in the amount of money in circulation, and how often to an increase in overall prices? I generally hear it defined formally as the latter, but also hear it in reference to the former. One typically leads to the other, of course, but I could imagine some pathological case where you have one and not the other. Is there a term that draws the distinction more explicitly?

      • Eric Rall says:
        February 8, 2019 at 3:34 pm

        I think the former is an Austrian School thing. One of the central arguments of Austrian School economics is that putting new money into circulation is distortionary, since it artificially lowers interest rates and encourages people to over-borrow (both for capital investment and consumer spending) and under-invest (in terms of savings rate).

        The former is the standard definition of inflation in mainstream economics (both Keynesian and Monetarist/Neoclassical), since in those frameworks it’s believed that the main harm from inflation is that unexpected changes in price level can radically change the real terms of long-term contracts (purchase agreements, wage agreements, fixed-rate loans, etc) from what the parties to those contracts thought they were agreeing to.

        I’ve encountered the terms “money supply inflation” or “debasement” or “increase in money supply” for the former, and “price inflation” for the latter.

      • dick says:
        February 8, 2019 at 3:43 pm

        Inflation is defined as a rise in prices, which is a function of both the amount of money in circulation and the amount of valuable stuff in circulation. An “increase in the amount of money in circulation” can be deflationary, if it’s not enough to keep up with GDP growth.

    • sfoil says:
      February 10, 2019 at 4:11 pm

      Thanks for the replies & discussion.

  47. Nornagest says:
    February 7, 2019 at 7:42 pm

    Howdy, SSC hivemind. I have a question.

    I’m on the job market, and while it’s not my primary specialty, a lot of the places I’m interviewing with are looking for distributed systems design experience. I have done some of that in the past, but my skills in the area are five or seven years rusty, and it’s becoming an obstacle.

    Can anyone suggest a textbook or MOOC covering that territory that could help get me back up to speed? Cost no object within the usual range for technical references, but I’d be looking for something more didactic and less reference-oriented, ideally.

    • pontifex says:
      February 7, 2019 at 8:36 pm

      Read the DynamoDB paper, the Chubby paper, the Raft paper, the GoogleFS and BigTable papers, and maybe something about Calvin or Ceph and you’ll be able to ace any interview. Maybe also read The Tail at Scale. Reading the primary sources is more interesting than reading someone’s gloss on them anyway.

      Oh, also, you can go arbitrarily deep on trying to understand FLP impossibility or the exact taxonomy of consistency models. But you don’t really need it.

    • dumpstergrad says:
      February 8, 2019 at 7:02 am

      If you’re currently working for a larger company, the easiest thing to learn will be the most relevant things to your current job. Figure out who runs your release process, and who maintains it from an operational perspective. Then shadow those teams. Read their manuals, ride along to planning meetings, and read their architectural documents. Any modern company is going to be running a distributed system. Your goal, should you choose to accept it, is figuring out what this means internal to your company.

      This also gets you points for working cross-functionally, will give you an idea what your work looks like downstream, and is a nice way to build soft skills, which tend to be highly underrated in the software development industry.

      This combined with reading the papers Pontifex recommends gives you the benefit of being up to date on the principles of modern distributed systems while having some grounded examples to speak to over the course of an interview.

  48. LesHapablap says:
    February 7, 2019 at 9:37 pm

    I’m chief pilot at a small airline and looking for some advice on how to train people to a) think ahead and constantly be evaluating a situation and b) being ‘proactive’ and ‘decisive’ instead of slow and ‘reactive’ in decision making. This is precipitated by an incident with one of our new pilots who was pretty well trained and had a lot of command under supervision time but had a couple glaring mistakes while I was supervising him the other day.

    Most everyone I’ve talked to in aviation has said those ‘skills/attitudes’ just come down to experience or natural competence and had no suggestions for training it, though one very experienced guy at CAA suggested that having a pilot do an impromptu precautionary off-airport landing was good at assessing those things.

    I know I haven’t defined the skills here very well, which is part of the problem I think, they are difficult to define. But does anyone have any suggestions from other industries or the military for ways to inculcate these ways of thinking and behaving? I have my own ideas but I’m curious if anyone else has suggestions from different perspectives.

    • dndnrsn says:
      February 7, 2019 at 11:55 pm

      Not from industry or the military, but some sports (my experience is martial arts, but I gotta assume there are equivalents in other sports) – drills where the idea is “things are already going wrong, what do you do?” Like, I don’t know, shark-tanking someone in grappling (consistently putting fresh opponents in against them, one after the other, very quickly – the idea being to simulate what happens if you are exhausted and your opponent is fresh). The idea, I think, is that people practicing things (especially in “live” practice like sparring) tend to gravitate towards techniques, tactics, strategies which are comfortable and safe. An off-airport landing would fit into this sort of thing. At a minimum, it would encourage not getting flustered when things are going wrong (being exhausted when grappling someone who isn’t feels horrible, I imagine it’s what drowning feels like, and this weird acquired claustrophobia, and you want to give up, but after it’s happened a few times you realize while it feels like you’re dying, you aren’t). Some scenarios (equivalent of “you’re down x points, so you need to score x+1 points to win, oh and you have a minute/an inning/whatever”) would help with decisiveness, etc.

      EDIT: I would have assumed that pilot training already does this, but the suggestion that doing off-airport landings would be a good idea indicates to me maybe not so much as I would have thought?

      • John Schilling says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:14 am

        Pilot training, including recurrent training, routinely involves the instructor or examiner reducing the throttle to idle and saying “now what”?, but the engine always comes back when the airplane is solidly established on short final to an appropriate farmers’ field or whatnot. I don’t think it would be practical to pre-clear a safe and legal landing on every spot a pilot might chose for an emergency landing when hit with this scenaro at 5000′ or whatever.

        The “precautionary landing” the OP talks about is a slightly different thing; that’s e.g. an oil-pressure indicator going to zero even though the engine seems to be running fine at the moment, and touching down at the nearest suitable spot so you can open the cowling and actually look. This could be practiced in a controlled and safe manner, I think, but almost never is. I’m not sure it would be hugely valuable, though.

        • LesHapablap says:
          February 8, 2019 at 10:54 am

          The precautionary landing is demonstrated usually as “the weather is closing in and you’ve run out of options to turn back. You don’t need to rush, but you need to select an appropriate place to land, assess all the appropriate factors, plan your approach and execute it, and remain under 800ft AGL” So it involves a lot of assessment and decision making under a bit of time pressure.

          I never did it in the states for a private license but it is required here for a commercial license and we have to demonstrate it occasionally on our annual checks.

          We could do it more often, but then how well is this going to relate to other kinds of decision making etc? You can’t just practice these over and over and expect to get better generally. Plus flying airplanes is expensive and I’d rather do the training on the ground if possible.

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:00 am

        dndnrsn,

        That’s interesting. Coming up with some scenarios must be the right way to do it, it’ll just be a case of what’s the most effective: paper based scenarios, timed-paper based scenarios, scenarios with some real elements like a recording of a radio of some traffic conflicts, incorporating a sim, etc.

        Introducing fatigue could be done by doing the training/assessing at the end of a long day. It would certainly make the scenarios more challenging.

        • dndnrsn says:
          February 8, 2019 at 12:47 pm

          My understanding – which is very limited – is that most airplane accidents are the result not of the pilots lacking the skills of flying the plane, but of the pilots making a mistake under pressure that they would not make without that pressure. However, it is probably not feasible to simulate the sorts of things that precede accidents – likely unsafe, for starters. I imagine simulators might be the best option, but I have no idea how good they are nor how expensive they are.

          It’s a similar problem to martial arts – training in the gym with your friends, even if you are all going as hard as you can, is just qualitatively different from competition against someone you’ve never met before in an unfamiliar environment, or a real fight. The best that can be done is to introduce artificial handicaps, like unrealistic fatigue (for example, in competition, if you’re not fresh for your first match, something has gone terribly wrong, and even in a large competition, you’re not going to have more than a half-dozen matches, tops).

          Doing something like some kind of “worst case scenario” at the end of a long day might work. Is it feasible/ethical to spring something on people when they’re sick, tired, hung over? (I know a guy who has a story about the coach taking them out drinking, then when everyone was kinda drunk, demanding that they go back to the gym and train kickboxing) – I imagine that air accidents disproportionately happen when pilots are fatigued, sick, hungover, drunk, whatever.

          • bean says:
            February 8, 2019 at 12:55 pm

            I imagine that air accidents disproportionately happen when pilots are fatigued, sick, hungover, drunk, whatever.

            There are strict rules against flying while in those states. I forget the exact number, but there’s absolutely no drinking allowed 8-12 hours before you fly, and there are also rules mandating crew rest. Not sure how “no flying while sick” is enforced offhand, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something.

          • LesHapablap says:
            February 8, 2019 at 1:11 pm

            It is certainly feasible and ethical enough for me. Would the results be better than doing it when they are more alert? I would guess in an academic setting that retention would be hurt by being fatigued, but this is different from that kind of learning. Certainly couldn’t hurt to try.

            Getting that realism and stress in a practice setting is a challenge. Navy Seals use live ammunition and real explosives, and I’ve heard that the CIA uses drugs to enhance stress.

            Could get a good effect with a high dose of caffeine at the end of a long day, then throw them in the simulator with some pre-planned scenarios. Have some other pilots looking over their shoulder to add a bit of social pressure.

          • dndnrsn says:
            February 9, 2019 at 1:44 am

            @bean

            How well are those rules enforced? If a pilot got drunk last night, rolls in bleary-eyed at whenever for an evening flight, and is feeling crappy and exhausted by takeoff time – is that something where someone will notice it and keep them from flying? If someone spent the mandated time “sleeping”, but for whatever reason did not get enough actual sleep, is there any way to handle that?

            @LesHapablap

            In martial arts, the important thing to learn in situations like that is, you’re tougher than you think – the training makes you tougher, but a large part of it is about teaching you where the line between “ultimately OK” and “in danger of imminent injury” is. I would hope that if a pilot has done a demanding simulation while tired and wired, with someone yelling at them, etc, if something goes wrong in reality, they’ll be better able to keep a clear head and do the stuff they definitely know how to do if they’re a licensed commercial pilot.

    • SamChevre says:
      February 8, 2019 at 4:37 am

      It’s clearly a group of skills that are used together, but I’m not sure which skills in the group you want to focus on:

      Group 1) Continuing to constantly evaluate a situation when nothing is happening, or the same thing is happening over and over. One group of people who train on this are guards, and general security personnel. I haven’t done that training, but that might be a starting point–how do you train a pilot to stay attentive to the right things for several hours of normal flight seems related to how do you train a gate guard to stay attentive for several hours of normal gate traffic.

      Group 2) Reacting rapidly in a way that gets you ahead of the situation rather than behind. This is where stress drills really help. The first time something goes wrong, you will be reactive; once the same thing has gone wrong 50 times, you can get ahead of the situation without thinking. (Trained drivers do this for skids and spins; pilot training usually includes simulated stalls and engine loss for the same reason.)

      The two are interactive, but I believe they are different skills and take different training.

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:11 am

        What I think of group 1: constantly thinking 20 minutes in front of the aircraft. The subject in this case is good at having situational awareness for what’s going on around him, but not so much at thinking about possible future threats.

        Group 2: aviation skills don’t really require that rapid response except for in a few cases (engine failure in a piston-twin after take-off or stall recovery).

        An example of the decisiveness I mean might be: while you are 90 seconds from landing, the wind is reported as a 5 knot tail wind for your chosen runway. How long does it take you to decide whether to continue or to change runways (3 seconds would be good, more than 5 seconds would be bad)? If you decide to continue, do you blindly continue the approach as normal without thinking about how this changes things or do you make adjustments and plan for if it gets worse?

    • bean says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:58 am

      Would it be a stupid suggestion to say simulator work? I’d presume you don’t have full simulators for whatever you fly (and I’d be curious to know what that is), you could probably do a decent job of testing emergencies with a PC-based system. It doesn’t have to be your airplane, and it might even be a good thing if it isn’t to make sure you don’t train in bad responses. But it does let you throw problems at them with no risk of crashing a real airplane. And if you get something with some cool stuff, it can be a carrot to spend time on it. “We’ll let you fly an F-16 (or whatever) on company time, but be aware that we’ll throw problems at you.”
      (I have experience in the airline industry, but very far away from the pointy end.)

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:21 am

        We fly single engine piston aircraft VFR through the mountains in an area with lots of traffic and lots of weather. Mostly uncontrolled and without radar coverage.

        We use the Google Earth flight sim in initial training a LOT to get familiar with the area, since the landscape looks a lot more realistic than in X-plane or MS flight sim. We also use it with radio recordings to help the trainee practice attaining situational awareness and getting an ear for all the radio calls.

        Simulators may be pretty useful for building up these skills. The ideal would be something like those sims they run in star trek on the bridge. Also, in the navy they constantly drill different scenarios and run war games, correct?

        • bean says:
          February 8, 2019 at 12:33 pm

          We fly single engine piston aircraft VFR through the mountains in an area with lots of traffic and lots of weather. Mostly uncontrolled and without radar coverage.

          Ah. I’d guess Alaska, but you appear to be in Canada, instead. Yukon?
          If so, very interesting flying. I once worked with an Alaskan airline, and got some good stories out of it.

          The ideal would be something like those sims they run in star trek on the bridge. Also, in the navy they constantly drill different scenarios and run war games, correct?

          They do, and I think you could probably do your equivalent with a good simulator package. X-plane has an instructor mode, and I suspect that you can do the same thing with Microsoft flight simulator. Put together a bunch of different combinations of traffic, weather, and systems problems, then turn them loose.

    • sfoil says:
      February 8, 2019 at 8:39 am

      bean suggested simulators. I’m not familiar with flying or with what’s mandated by the FAA/your company in the simulator, but I know there is required simulator time.

      My suggestion to the extent I can make one would be to put the pilots in the simulator and have something go wrong. I believe this is already a requirement. The important part is the debriefing/After Action Review/whatever, where you get the pilot to tell you a) what went wrong b) what they did c) what they ought to have done, to include how they could have noticed something going wrong earlier — this should involve self-criticism, and you need to make it clear that it’s better for the flyer to identify the problem than his coach. Keep records of all this. Then do it again — immediately first, and then days or weeks later.

      You will probably need to incentivize this. The culture among your company’s pilots may cause them to perceive this process as a lowering in status, so you need to raise the status of people that embrace it, whether through money, promotions, favorable assignments, whatever.

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 8, 2019 at 11:28 am

        Thanks that’s quite useful.

        Are you suggesting they do the exact same scenario again right away, or something different but similar?

        • sfoil says:
          February 8, 2019 at 1:18 pm

          Ideally, it would be different but similar. It’s difficult to check for learning if they’re just literally replaying an identical situation. But it doesn’t take much to make sure they’re not just relying on rote memorization of the scenario: “light comes on after X instead of Y minutes” is probably all you need.

        • LesHapablap says:
          February 8, 2019 at 1:51 pm

          I just been trying to list scenarios that I can use this way. One thing troubles me though: if I’m measuring trainees by their reaction/decision time to a new threat, is that going to be subject to Goodheart’s law? Would I be encouraging rash decision making? I will have to make sure the subject verbally goes through his thought process in real time. I’ll have some of the senior pilots do it first in order to get a baseline for what to expect from experienced pilots.

          • sfoil says:
            February 9, 2019 at 10:50 am

            They don’t need explain their thinking in real time, they need to do it afterwards. You’re trying to train anticipation, so if X bad thing happens the pilot should be able to explain afterwards why he didn’t notice the precursor or, if he did notice, why he didn’t do anything about it.

            Let’s say (I’m just making this up) that when the red indicator light comes on, I need to land ASAP. If this light can come on without warning, I should always have a plan to do land. If the light comes on and I now have to decide where to land, it indicates that I hadn’t made that decision beforehand (what you want). There shouldn’t be any “rash decision making” involved.

    • LesHapablap says:
      February 8, 2019 at 11:32 am

      If you want to teach someone to be decisive while flying, can you have them do something that requires decisiveness in another domain? How close would it have to be before that mindset transfers over? Or is decisiveness really just experience and confidence, and therefore they would need be confident in the specific domain?

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      February 8, 2019 at 2:50 pm

      but had a couple glaring mistakes while I was supervising him the other day.

      What kind of glaring mistakes?

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 8, 2019 at 4:44 pm

        Don’t know how much I want to say in public here. First there was some opposite direction traffic that he recognized but hesitated and didn’t do enough about it. After passing those planes, he didn’t bother to check if there were any more aircraft coming from the same source and descended down a cloud break at the head of a valley with more oncoming traffic.

    • Incurian says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:28 pm

      Share real stories about mistakes that other pilots have made, and discuss how they could have been avoided.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        February 9, 2019 at 8:13 am

        One of my favorite engineering classes in college, and the one I think actually changed me into an engineer, was the one where a majority of class time was looking at past disasters.

      • LesHapablap says:
        February 9, 2019 at 11:47 am

        We do a lot of this, but informally. Maybe it’s worth doing it in a more formal way with some diagrams and audio recordings if possible, forming a collection of incidents. And then for the informal debriefing at the end of each day we could keep a magnetized map with some magnet aircraft handy.

    • Radu Floricica says:
      February 11, 2019 at 10:32 am

      Too tired to offer more than a shot in the dark, but this conversation reminds me a lot of discussions on safe motorcycle riding. Maybe you can find out how they do it? One suggestion is books, other is discussing common failure modes.

  49. salvorhardin says:
    February 7, 2019 at 10:01 pm

    Limiting “operations” only to interventions aimed at regime change (ignoring intelligence gathering per se), and “successful” only to long-term outcomes for US security and the quality of life in the intervened-in country (ignoring moral questions around means employed and short-term disruption), one might cite, from least to most controversial and morally compromised:

    1. defeating the Communists in the 1948 Italian elections
    2. fomenting the assassination of Trujillo
    3. undermining Allende and subsequently supporting Pinochet

  50. ilikekittycat says:
    February 8, 2019 at 1:58 am

    Overcast/Paperclip advanced our marker at least one position along the “Space Race” track

  51. SamChevre says:
    February 8, 2019 at 4:27 am

    Question about changing social norms:

    When did “using dark makeup to imitate a specific black person” become categorized as inappropriate “blackface.”

    Traditional minstrelry blackface has been considered unacceptable for as long as I’ve known it existed. However, current thinking (see Virginia) seems to be that “dressing up as Kurtis Blow or Michael Jackson, wearing dark make-up, in a talent show” is equally unacceptable, and I think that norm is new.

    Commentariat?

    • ana53294 says:
      February 8, 2019 at 4:39 am

      In Spain, blackface is quite common, and not yet considered very racist, although I am sure this American tendency will arrive soon.

      In Spain, the night before Epiphany, towns celebrate it by having a carriage with the three Biblical Magi. Now, I don’t know how true it is, or where their names come from. But according to popular tradition, one of them is black. All these carriage rides go around the town and throw candy at kids, and this is all volunteer work (local businesses give money for the candy and stuff). Big cities like Madrid find suitable black volunteers, but small town with no black people in them just paint somebody.

      This is still done, and my best guess is this will stop when we have enough black people to be able to volunteer in the smallest of towns.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:
        February 8, 2019 at 7:56 am

        The candy they throw might include Conguitos.

      • Evan Þ says:
        February 8, 2019 at 9:54 am

        To follow up on your “I don’t know,” the Bible doesn’t give any names or ethnicities, and doesn’t even say there were three. All it says is that “Magi from the east” came to visit the baby Jesus and gave him three gifts. As the Magi were a well-known priestly class in Zoroastrian Persia, I’d presume (along with most modern commentators) they were all Persian.

        Wikipedia says their traditional names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, together with the identification of Balthazar as black, probably derive from “a Greek manuscript probably composed in Alexandria around 500.”

    • Deiseach says:
      February 8, 2019 at 5:14 am

      I can’t speak for America, but I’m old enough to remember when golliwogs were non-controversial toys (and then they became controversial) and The Black and White Minstrel Show, an English light entertainment programme that ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978. You look at it now and wonder how on earth it could possibly have been made, but back then it was simply another form of entertainment*. So 1980s dressing-up was okay then but by today’s standards is unacceptable, and I wonder if that change started in the 90s? I remember something in an episode of “Designing Women” where they were arguing over dressing up (including dark makeup) as The Supremes for Hallowe’en or a costume party, and asked their black male employee if this was okay or not.

      *Just like The Good Old Days, which ran from 1953-1983 and emulated Victorian and Edwardian music hall, with the audience dressed in appropriate costume and singing along. Yes, Irish and British TV when I was a small child was strange.

      • Plumber says:
        February 8, 2019 at 3:03 pm

        @Deiseach

        “I can’t speak for America, but I’m old enough to remember when golliwogs were non-controversial toys (and then they became controversial) and The Black and White Minstrel Show, an English light entertainment programme that ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978”

        I can almost imagine something like The Black and White Minstrel Show on U.S.A. television in 1958, but still on in 1978?!!

        The Atlantic Ocean is wider than I thought!

    • J Mann says:
      February 8, 2019 at 6:35 am

      I was wondering this too. My rough read is that it was always seen as offensive, but has grown into an n-word-style tripwire over the last couple decades.

      Some data points.

      1986: The 1986 movie “Soul Man,” about a white kid who attends Harvard in blackface to get a scholarship, then learns a valuable lesson about life, doesn’t seem to have set off major alarms around blackface. An NAACP statement at the time objected primarily to the message, stating “That notion itself–that some white kid can take a bunch of ‘tanning pills’ and all of a sudden understand all the things we have to deal with–is very offensive to us. … That simplistic attitude treats the problem as if it were merely a matter of dark skin and not of 400 years of diversified culture. It’s a very misleading film.” The spokesman also objected to “the Al Jolson-like portrayal of the main character,” but that was secondary, not the trip-wire it would be today. Similarly, Rae Dawn Chong gave an interview a few years ago where she said that Spike Lee was one of the drivers, but none of those stories seemed to be republished. C. Thomas Howell, who played the male lead, also said that the movie “didn’t play well among some segments of the black community” because a “white man donning blackface is taboo.” Roger Ebert, a reliable liberal, hated the movie, but never mentioned blackface.

      1993: Ted Danson puts on blackface and does minstel comedy, white lips, n-word, watermelon and all, at the Friars Club roast of his then girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. Although Friars’ roasts are supposed to be as offensive as possible and Goldberg vouches for him on stage, it is a complete disaster.

      2000: Spike Lee makes Bamboozled, a film that centers around the emotional impact of blackface and the offensiveness of the minstrel era, among a bunch of other things. This time, Roger Ebert objects to the blackface(!), finding it “so blatant, so wounding, so highly charged, that it obscures any point being made by the person wearing it.”

      Rough interpretation: in 1986, blackface was offensive to a lot of African Americans, but wasn’t a big enough issue to prevent Soul Man, or to be the lead objection when people were criticizing the movie. White liberals like Ebert didn’t even see the problem, at least for a superficially well-intentioned effort.

      Based on events like the Goldberg roast, Bamboozled, and others, awareness has been steadily increasing, to the point now where it can be a career killer regardless of intentions.’

      There’s a separate issue, which is viral outrage culture – when things like a person calling the police on people grilling in the wrong place go viral, blackface is going to set off alarm bells.

      • bean says:
        February 8, 2019 at 6:48 am

        On the other hand, Ted Danson’s career wasn’t exactly sunk by the roast, and Robert Downey Jr. did blackface in Tropic Thunder in 2008 without too much trouble.

        • Conrad Honcho says:
          February 8, 2019 at 6:51 am

          First, I really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when RDJ’s agent called him up and said, “Robert! I’ve got a great script for ya! You’re in blackface!”

          That said, I think he was able to get away with it because the point of the character is that he’s so up his own ass he’s oblivious to how terrible an idea this is. See also Mac and Dennis on It’s Always Sunny playing Danny Glover in their sequel to Lethal Weapon. The joke of the show is that the Gang are horrible people who are completely socially inept. You’re not laughing at the blackface, you’re laughing at the kinds of morons who would think they should do blackface.

          • convie says:
            February 8, 2019 at 7:10 am

            Only Mac did the character in blackface. They were actually debating whether it is ever acceptable, Mac saying it is if done tastefully and giving Lawrence Olivier in Othello as an example. The reason the tricked Dee into bringing her class into to watch it was to help settle their debate.

          • Conrad Honcho says:
            February 8, 2019 at 7:12 am

            Wait, I thought they switched in the middle? It’s been awhile since I saw that episode but I thought they both did it.

          • convie says:
            February 8, 2019 at 9:59 am

            Wait, I thought they switched in the middle? It’s been awhile since I saw that episode but I thought they both did it.

            They switched but Dennis did the character without the makeup.

          • baconbits9 says:
            February 8, 2019 at 10:03 am

            Othello was black? I thought he was a Moop.

          • Tarpitz says:
            February 8, 2019 at 11:57 pm

            There is considerable debate over exactly what Shakespeare meant by “Moor”. Both Berber and Sub-Saharan African interpretations are pretty common, but the latter more so.

        • Plumber says:
          February 8, 2019 at 11:40 am

          @bean

          “Tropic Thu