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@Bean
Naval Gazing’s fallen over again.
Yeah, I know. It came back within a few hours.
Article on how journalist writes authoritative-sounding articles about anything. Makes me wonder – are all of them like that?
The thing I like about Scott is that he either knows a subject, and can share personal anecdotes and such, or he acknowledges his lack of knowledge on the subject, even when he did way more than five days of googling. Since when did five days of googling become enough to write articles in specialist magazines?
No, all of them aren’t like that. Most of them don’t do nearly that much research.
1) We have no reason to think the author of this article actually researched any of these steps on how to write informative articles on topics they are clueless about. /joke
2) “Step 3: Ask an expert” is far from a mere googling.
3) It’s pretty obvious a lot of articles are written like this.
4) Specialist journalists exist, and are actually typical in specialist magazines. Filler also exists, even in specialist magazines.
5) It’s a good habit to always assume an article is just a starting point on becoming informed about a subject.
6) If an author follows the instructions in this article, then they will be approximately as informed about a topic as any naive person would after a week of research and questioning experts. How bad is that for something that takes the naive person mere minutes to read? The best teachers tend to be peers who just learned a subject, or those who have taught naive students for decades.
We have no idea what this article on cigars was. Perhaps it was an article the magazine wanted as an introduction to a topic.
I know a girl who worked as a journalist in mainstream offline newspapers, and she described me her work like this:
In the morning, the boss assigned her a topic, sometimes something she never heard about before. She had time until 4PM to produce two articles on the topic. So she used Google to find some information, and then tried to call an expert to get a quote. (Most experts didn’t want to talk to journalists; I guess it’s obvious why. But there were a few people always willing to give a quote, and having their numbers often saved her day.) This was all she could do in given circumstances.
When the newspaper came online, the only change was that in addition to the two articles for printed version, she also had to produce two more, shorter articles on the same topic for the online edition. (Those two extra articles were signed by a pseudonym, to make an impression that they were written by someone else. It would probably look stupid to have four separate articles on the same topic produced by the same person on the same day.)
She would have preferred to have more time to do serious work, or to be allowed to write about topics she was an expert at, but that wasn’t an option. The newspaper had two or three “senior” journalists who were allowed to do serious work, and everyone else was there to provide a filler. The “junior” journalists usually burned out soon and quit; so did she. That was all according to the plan; the newspaper was recruiting among students constantly.
It feels like I am seeing a lot of ads for veganism here in Toronto, more than I remember from twenty or even ten years ago. Could this be an area where the standards of ordinary behavior are poised for a shift? We might move from factory-farmed supermarket meat being just fine to humane farming practices and meat quality being something ordinary people worry about. Things do change; we didn’t worry so much about coffee and beer a generation ago.
Oh right, meat. I wanted to ask about that.
Did meals served on airplanes change to more vegetarian this decade? I mean, are they serving vegetarian dishes rather than chicken dishes now? I travel little on airplanes, and I don’t take notes of what they serve either, so I can’t really tell. But on two of my last three airplane travel legs, I was served a vegetarian sandwich. (The third was so short that they only served a snack.)
On recent flights with meal service that I’ve been on, there’s been a meat option and a vegetarian option to choose from.
Could well be. See Taleb here for the explanation why
Somehow, this comic made me think of SSC and the rationalist community….
Yeah, Weinersmith seems to be drifting pretty ratadj these days.
Pretty sure that kind of take has always been a staple of SMBC.
— wait, his name is Weinersmith? Is he who Isis went to for a prosthetic because a fish ate Osiris’s original weiner?
He was born Zach Weiner and fell in love with a Miss Kelly Smith, who shares his sense of humour. (i think her research was once mentioned in a linkpost here)
It’s double barrelled but without the hyphen.
Ahhh, OK.
So I can raise controversial topics here, eh?
Here’s this year’s chemistry Nobel prize.
What the heck is their deal with solar and wind power? Why’d they put it in this announcement? Note that the chemistry Nobel prize is awarded in Sweden, not in Norway which gets cheap energy from their rivers.
You can shovel coal, open gas valves and pull out control rods whenever you need a bit more power.
You can’t tell everyone to wait for it to get a bit windy/sunnier before putting the kettle on.
With significantly better batteries, you get to store the wind/solar power from when it’s available to when it’s needed.
Lithium-ion batteries actually are the only viable technology right now for storing renewable energy. Every other electrochemical alternative is:
a) Too expensive up-front, like nickel-metal hydride or nickel-cadmium;
b) Too expensive to maintain, like lead-acid;
c) Both, like zinc-bromide.
You can argue about whether or not renewable energy is necessary for the future, but Li-ion is the only technology that makes it feasible.
Not convinced. Intermittent energy from solar or wind can be used to produce hydrogen or maybe synthetic hydrocarbon fuels (or not-so-synthetic by way of fertilizer for biofuel crops). Or energy can be stored in dams for later hydroelectric power.
You can argue that these technologies aren’t “viable”, but I think they are proved technologies, and lithium batteries are not available at the scale needed to make much of a dent in global energy supply.
For comparison, the US has strategic reserves of 4G barrels of oil, the energy equivalent of ~7×10^12 kWh, equal to more than 300 000 years of Tesla production.
Neither lithium-ion batteries nor synthetic hydrocarbon production plants are available at the necessary scales. However, I believe that batteries are a much more efficient method of energy storage than synthesized fuels. (80-90% charge-discharge efficiency for Li-ion batteries vs. 40-60% for hydrogen fuel cells–even lower, actually, since that doesn’t account for energy losses in producing the hydrogen.) If we’re going to try to scale one of these up, I’d go for the batteries.
Pumped hydro is limited by geography.
There’s not many places where hydro is viable but hasn’t been built yet.
H2 is a slippery wee bastard of a molecule that takes up loads of space. It’ll do anything to sneak through any crack or seals, as well as solid metal itself. And it goes bang in a bigger way than lithium does.
Synthetic hydrocarbons are a cool upcoming technology, but I don’t think the chamistry’s there yet.
Biofuels are a great way to starve folks in the developing world.
Sure, the US has more of something that’s been squirting itself out of the ground for 100 years than something that people have been making in factories for a couple of decades.
Also the Army doesn’t run on Teslas.
Lithium’s not a panacea. Neither are the other things you’ve listed.
Maybe I didn’t make it clear, but the point is that the amount of available lithium is miniscule. US electricity is about 10^10 kWh/day, so if renewable is 10% of that, and we need a 10-day buffer, that’s something like 50 million tons of lithium. Global yearly production is 85 000 tons.
Growth in lithium mining is still looking pretty exponential.
Sure, maybe we discover efficient fusion tomorrow or we find out that climate change isn’t a problem or we manage to adsorb loads of hydrogen onto the surface of zeolites or something.
But I figure ‘lithium ion batteries become an important factor in the energy market within the next few decades’ is a plausible enough future to throw a sentence about it into the nobel prize announcement.
Also electric vehicles.
Do you mean something specific?
I think most beliefs about catastrophic failures of energy storage are confused by the amount of energy stored. Lithium hasn’t been used for storing large amounts of energy, so lithium battery failures haven’t been very big. The worst energy storage disasters have been dam collapses, because that’s where the energy is.
I am skeptical of your claim that the life-cycle cost of lithium-ion batteries is lower than that of lead-acid batteries (and all the rest, but let’s stick with lead-acid for now).
Basically every navy on Earth that uses diesel-electric submarines, still uses lead-acid for the electric part in spite of the substantial performance advantage of lithium. They do not do this because they are stupid, or ignorant. They do this because even with national defense budgets to draw from, they have trouble afffording a submarine fleet’s worth of lithium batteries. But they somehow can afford the maintenance on lead-acid batteries.
The Japanese Navy currently operates a single, rather expensive, lithium-battery submarine as an experiment to determine whether the improved performance is worth the extra cost. Jury is still out, and that’s an application where performance is a premium.
Lithium-ion is for applications where you care enough to pay extra to shrink your power system into a smaller and lighter package, or for where you need the New Hotness instead of the Old & Busted to spruce up your advertising brochure or your science-fair project. But for filling warehouses with cheap utility power, I’m not buying it quite yet.
Nobel-worthy as an achievement in the applied sciences, yes, probably, but the whole “fossil-fuel-free society” part looks a lot like the Nobel committee combining the New Hotness and the Political Correctness for their advertising brochure.
It’s worth noting that the backup battery rooms at our dams for black-starting the grid use lead-acid.
Sure, but with big infrastructure like that, a lot of it could be legacy and conservatism. Black start became a huge issue in 1965, when lead-acid was the only real choice for a battery. So even if lithium-ion was better, it might not be used.
However I suspect lead-acid would still be the choice today for the reasons John points out, and for a one more reason — lithium-ion batteries last longest at 40-60% charge . Lead-acid batteries last longest at 100% charge, which prevents sulfate formation. You’re going to want your backup batteries to be fully charged, and you probably don’t cycle them much (both lead-acid and lithium-ion have a fairly low cycle life, but lead-acid lasts longer if not cycled).
The critical issue for lead-acid is operations & maintenance costs. Once manufactured, Li-ion batteries are sealed systems requiring no maintenance. By comparison, deep cycle Pb-acid batteries need to be periodically checked to maintain acid density and prevent stratification and require the occasional addition of sulfuric acid to maintain functionality. Here’s a pretty good PNNL report about the cost of energy of different battery technologies. It’s worth noting that this report assumes low O&M costs for Pb-acid, which results in shorter lifetimes. You can extend that, but only with more and more expensive maintenance.
The submarine has the advantage that it’s already paying the salaries for the sailors who’re doing the maintenance. Essentially, most of the O&M cost is already a sunk cost for the submarine. A standalone photovoltaic installation, OTOH, needs to have a bare minimum of staffing to keep costs low.
Also, at least in the US, mil-spec Li-ion batteries are actually pretty hard to come by at substantial volumes. We can’t rely on imported cells, so we have to let small companies like Yardney and Eagle-Picher make them.
I’m not sure this is correct. If the maintenance burden is substantial in terms of time, then there’s a lot of incentive to get rid of it, because people are expensive and submarines are always really tight on space. It’s possible the math is different for some types of remote power installations because a 10-minute check of the batteries requires 3 hours of driving, but you’ll need to nail down these costs more carefully.
1. If the demand was there, I’m pretty sure said small companies would grow.
2. The US hasn’t build a diesel-electric submarine since the 1950s.
Yes, the more distributed the batteries, the more expensive maintenance. The worst case scenario is putting batteries in individual homes. I think that is the right place to put batteries (in conjunction with distributed solar), but I don’t think that is obvious. In any event, it is what Tesla is selling right now and thus it is quite plausible that this product depends on using lithium-ion batteries to minimize maintenance and keep them safe from the average homeowner who doesn’t know how to do maintenance.
This. Reduction of crew size on submarines has always been a high priority, even more so than on surface ships. On submarines every cubic meter of habitable volume requires a full ton of submerged displacement, with all that implies in terms of steel and propulsion and systems and $$$. A typical oceangoing submarine from WW2 had 30-40 crewmen per thousand tons; for non-nuclear submarines in current production that’s down to 15 per thousand tons. And none of those people are sitting around with time on their hands to do extra maintenance work.
Or, to put it another way, the cost of a battery technician five hundred feet below the Atlantic is vastly greater than the cost of a battery technician in an industrial warehouse, and lead-acid still wins over lithium-ion on cost.
Saying that through their work they have created the right conditions for a fossil fuel-free society does seem premature, since:
1. That society does not exist yet.
2. We don’t know that it will ever exist.
3. If that society is to ever exist, I am not sure that Li-ion batteries will be considered the main enabler of such society.
The criteria for awarding the original Nobel prizes is:
The more avenues a particular invention opens, the more benefits it can be said to have had. Thus the harping on its utility for solar and wind power.
You all seem to be going towards power production. Lithium helps A LOT a “fossil free society” on the mobility end: lithium batteries may lose (for now) for mass storage and possibly on life-cycle cost, but they’re just without competition for anything that requires mobility. A quick google search suggests they’re about 3 times lighter than lead-acid – imagine a Tesla car being twice as heavy. Or a wireless power tool being almost 3 times as heavy. They’re not “worse”, they’re just not functional. So yeah, lithium batteries are pretty much essential to a “wireless and fossil free society”, with the tech we currently have in production.
In 20 years they may not be any more, maybe we’ll have hydrogen fuel cell everywhere. But that’s just normal progress, few things stay unchanged for 20 years.
Clearly, electric vehicles was almost a non-starter without lithium. Although I have owned one that used lead-acid, and driven one that ran on NiCd (or NiMH, maybe). But heavy, compartively slow, and limited in range.
But lithium is to lead as gasoline is to lithium. Or rather, where lithium has three times the energy density of lead, gasoline has 100x the energy of lithium. When modest amounts of energy are needed, a lighter electric motor compensates partially for limited energy storeage, but those strategic oil reserves are to a large extent for transportation, and they’re not going away soon, and very unlikely to be replaced by batteries.
Harnessable for purpose? Volume-wise or mass-wise? If it was the case volume-wise, then we’d get a couple thousand miles on half a gallon of gasoline, or alternately 10-20 miles on the lithium batteries in a Tesla.
The 100x figure represents the theoretical stored energy, and the ratio is approximately the same for both volume and mass. Once you take into account the actual efficiency of an electric versus gasoline motor, the gap narrows to about 20x, still in gasoline’s favor.
Lithium Ion: 0.3 MJ/kg 0.4 MJ/liter 60-80% motor efficiency
Gasoline: 47.5 MJ/kg 34.6 MJ/liter 15% motor efficiency
Numbers from this 2012 article, so it’s possible that improvements have been made since on either side: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm
A Tesla’s battery pack is 1200lb with a 265 mile range. A Porsche 911 Turbo gets about 20mpg, so 265 miles would be 13.25 gallons. A gallon of gasoline weight about 6.2 pounds, so 80 lb for the gasoline, or 15x range per weight.
For volume, that battery pack has 7104 18650s. The batteries are not nearly optimally packed (probably because it would melt if you did), so I’ll take a square prism of 18mm x 65mm (21060 mm^3) as an approximation. This is 150 liters, or about 40 gallons, so the gasoline car gets about three times the range per volume.
The 100x is probably about weight when you consider the gasoline car is getting about 20% efficiency compared to the Tesla’s 93% efficiency.
Are you saying a tesla actually runs on thousands of 18650s?
That’s crazy.
The Model 3 apparently uses larger Tesla-designed 2170 (21mm x 70mm) cells (still individual cylindrical cells!) but the older models use 18650 cells. Yeah, seems pretty crazy.
@The Nybbler:
> A Tesla’s battery pack is 1200lb
> This is 150 liters
I presume your numbers are right, but given that I think of lithium as light, I was surprised by how dense that battery pack is: 1200 lb = 550 kg. 550 kg / 150 L = 3.6 kg / L. Given the not-optimal packing, I first thought this means that Li ion batteries themselves must be about 4x the density of water. This would be surprising, because solid aluminum is only 2.6 kg/L [1].
This inspired me to actually weigh an 18650 to check. I got about 48g. From the web, the cylindrical volume is about 16 cm^3, for density of 3 kg/L. Heavy, but a little more reasonable. I think the discrepancy is that weight of the Tesla battery pack must include more than just the 18650’s, but also the structure that holds it all together. But it would be surprising if this structure is denser than the batteries themselves. This probably means that the “cubic prism” estimate is a bit on the low side, and the actual volume is somewhat greater than 150L.
Still, I’m surprised that the volume advantage of gasoline is so low. At 4x or 5x, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable disadvantage.
[1] Which in turn reminds me about someone’s long-ago comment about making lightweight bicycles from aluminum: although per volume aluminum is less than half the weight of steel, remember that “lightweight aluminum” is still as dense as granite!
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/fed-tries-to-figure-out-value-of-free-internet-services-to-americans.html
I read this article and have a question for economics people.
Asking people how much they would have to be paid to give up something like Google or Facebook is not a proxy for imputed GDP. Asking them how much they would pay for access to said technology is the actual imputed equivalent of addition to GDP.
If you asked me how much it would take to give up my wife, I would say infinite. If you asked me how much I would pay to keep my wife, this would be in the very low hundreds of thousands, because that’s how much money I could realistically get my hands on.
If you asked me how much it would take to give up 1500 calories a day (from my current diet), I’d say some huge number. But if you asked me how much I would pay to ensure I minimally had starvation rations, well the actual amount I pay for said rations is on the order of $10 per day, and that is the actual value attributed to GDP.
So what is Powell after here, if not just some boastful talking points and made-up numbers?
I’m not sure Powell is after anything, as such. It certainly reads to me like he’s simply citing what research there is (Brynjolfsson et al.) Whether the research is fit for purpose is another matter entirely.
Quoting the paper, the intent wasn’t to provide a measure for “missing” GDP, but rather:
I’ll have a read of the paper and see whether it seems sensible.
Thanks for offering to read the paper. I’d be very interested if it addresses well-being costs of ownership along with the well-being gains.
I’d pay to not have people expect me to have a cell phone. But since they expect me to have one, I pay to have one. As is, the $5-$6/month cell phone I have is not a smartphone, and so many text messages from businesses end up as “Enhanced message not translated” (which I pay to receive), instead of the actual message they were trying to send. Still not enough hassle to upgrade to a smartphone, though.
Have had a brief look – don’t really have the time to take it all in right now – and while they did try to make the choice consequential in one of their experiments, I’m not sure that the chosen method isn’t influencing their results.
Specifically, one of the experiments they did was to ask participants the following question:
The experiment was carried out on two samples in two consecutive years – 2016 and 2017 – n=1497 and n=1388, respectively. The sample selection process seems prima facie sensible. The price point was varied across $1, $10-$100 in increments of $10 and $1000 (12 points). Each respondent was asked the question once, take it or leave it, with a single price point.
The first thing that strikes me about this setup is that the question isn’t asking how much money you would accept to give up Facebook, but rather whether you’d give up Facebook for a 1 in 200 chance of winning $X – a very different question. I would expect people to want a more generous payout for giving up some known value if receiving it is uncertain.
Secondly, I am unable to readily locate any discussion of follow-up – was anyone’s usage actually measured and did anyone actually get any money. Like I said, I’ve just skimmed the paper, so I may have missed it, but I would consider the lack of such a follow-up a major methodological failure.
I’ll say more when I have time to give it an in-depth read.
@Faza I don’t think you have the methodology quite right, but I have problems with the way it works in my understanding.
The method, in several of their different approaches to assigning a value, seems to be that you either enter a bid or say yes or no to their bid for staying off facebook for a month. There’s some chance that you may be picked to actually have this transaction go through. Which is to say, you aren’t being asked to buy a lottery ticket (so to speak) by staying off facebook, you’re entering a bid that may or may not be instantaneously turned into a real transaction. I assume this is to allow them to get more data without expanding their budget too much.
My quibble with the methodology is that they don’t lock you out of facebook, they just don’t pay you unless you stay off it for a month. This makes it rational to accept really low bids if you’re taking the survey.
What would it cost to get me to accept being locked out of facebook for a month? I dunno, but probably $20 or so, there are plausible reasons I might want to see something on there. What bid would I accept for staying off facebook for a month, with no penalty save not receiving the money if I do go on there? Basically anything, it’s just free money if I don’t feel any particular urge to go on facebook in the coming month.
If everyone thought like me their reported valuation would be super low. Clearly everyone doesn’t think like me, and their work would appear to suggest a floor value, but this still seems like an experimental design issue.
I was also unable to find details of what the completion rate of the people who accepted the offer were.
@Rob K, I was in a bit of a hurry, so I may have gotten something wrong. What do you mean exactly? The question is quoted verbatim from the Supplementary Information, as are the price points and the sample sizes.
Fully agree with your reservations vis a vis block access to Facebook v. get a reward for not using Facebook.
Thanks Faza and Rob for reading it and reporting back.
@Faza
The part I was quibbling with was”whether you’d give up Facebook for a 1 in 200 chance of winning $X.” This may just be a communication issue; to me that sounds like it’s describing a transaction where only 1 in 200 participants who gives up facebook gets paid, whereas what they seem to be doing is a deal where 1 in 200 participants who names a price then receives the chance to give up facebook and get paid that price.
This is, ultimately, not a particularly important thing to straighten out. But that’s what I was getting at.
I once saw an article that said most people would not give up their FB accounts for anything less than [some surprisingly high number I can’t recall at the moment]. It didn’t make much of an impact because I gave up my account for free, and actually consider it to have been a “value-added” decision (so it’s as if I was paid to do it). So have many other people.
There are two things at work here. I think it is a well known fallacy (or what you call it) that people in general are loss averse. A good illustration (heard on the Econtalk podcast, I think) is that you want to go to a concert, but don’t have tickets, and don’t want to pay the $500 bucks scalpers are asking. If you then find tickets on the street, you happily go to the concert – rather than sell the tickets for $500.
I think this effect gets more profound when large values are at stake, partly because of diminishing utility from wealth (it is much worse for me to have my income reduced by 90% than to have it increased by 90%, or even increased by 1000%).
The survey seems to have addressed this by asking about a month of Facebook and compensations on the order of tens of dollars.
The important bit: there is a huge amount of value created in final consumption, in the difference between what I would be willing to pay, and the actual price tag. This is pure profit for the consumer, and it is big. Especially for everything online that is basically free to use – I can hardly imagine going back to not having email, Wikipedia, Google’s services, and so on. Even something as annoying and moderately useful as Facebook.
The concert ticket issue has a middle-man problem, in that it plausibly takes more effort to sell tickets for $500 than it takes to go to the concert. So the actual opportunity cost of the tickets to the lucky concert-goer is less than $500.
I understand this. But when it comes to wellbeing I think it’s generally assumed that individual humans are only capable of experiencing a finite amount of it, regardless. And it’s quite an argument to say that the amount we experience changes in average capacity over enough years.
Ultimately this wellbeing does translate to GDP, though. So I think changes to GDP are ultimately the only things we can measure as a true proxy for wellbeing-over-time.
We used to be able to discuss the news or entertainment with anyone, and get the wellbeing of bonding (to the extent differing opinions allowed) with anyone. Not so much anymore with the vast amount of variety available. This is a real trade-off, and while many people miss wellbeing like this, getting it back becomes more difficult, if not impossible.
(I’ve never used Facebook, so have no understanding of what anyone gets from it. I however can understand the cost to someone of forgoing Facebook when sufficient numbers of people they interact with have transitioned to Facebook. If the offer was to an entire network of people [e.g. a PTA group] to forgo Facebook, then they may forgo it much easier than a single person, as they can easily transition to phonecalls, ham radio, neighborly chats, etc… So the ultimate value of Facebook is not the sum of its value to each user.)
Edit: removing words and a character to align Facebook on three separate lines, and on a fifth line one line below the three lines.
@anonymousskimmer >
I’ve only been on Facebook for a couple of months and it’s entertaining, but I will go without it for a month for a sourdough bread corned beef sandwich with mustard and tomato slices, plus a pint of NewCastle brown ale or a tasty equivalent beer.
To give up Google for a month as well have someone come to my job at quitting time on a Thursday or Friday, and drive me and my car to within a mile of my house, plus the sandwich and beer.
I think they’re talking about price vs consumer surplus and trying to divine consumer surplus.
Almost every thing you own or consume is actually more valuable than what you paid for it. The easiest way to think about this is water. Clean drinking water is literally the most valuable physical good because you die in three days without it. Yet it’s ridiculously cheap, so cheap that most renters have never seen a water bill. Same for food, heat, most of the basic necessities besides shelter (housing).
This creates a problem for economists and the way they/we model it is consumer surplus and producer surplus. Producer surplus is baaasically profit, but consumer profit is the theoretical max price you would pay for something. So theoretically I would buy bourbon at $50/fifth, but because of companies competing with each other I actually buy it for $25. I therefore get $25 of consumer surplus and the producer/bourbon distiller gets $25 minus costs/distribution as profit. Joel on Software had a really good post on this.
This creates an issue because we can’t really measure consumer surplus. We can measure costs/profits very well and we know what people pay for stuff but we don’t really know what it’s worth. So GDP isn’t actually the value of all good and services produced, it’s literally the lowest possible value because we’re presuming no one valued those goods at more than what they paid for them.
Powell is waving at this problem because there’s lots of new things that have $0 price: Facebook, Google, TV in a sense as well. They obviously have some value beyond showing ads but there’s no way we can measure it.
As for the paper itself, Faza (TCM)’s description makes it sound really clever but I doubt they’re within miles of a solution and the answers they gave are ridiculous enough (except for FB) that I feel pretty justified in dismissing them. They’re basically shooting for the Holy Grail of economics, since if we can directly consumer surplus, we basically know both demand and supply for every good and can ditch the price system (and probably capitalism too).
Thanks. I can see the reason for theoretical economists trying to measure this Holy Grail (which I believe isn’t possible to accurately measure, since first you need to solve the externality and sum-of-parts problems), but it does seem ridiculous for an applied economist to talk about it.
It’s not the lowest possible value when considering non-returnable items that the buyer regrets buying. Something plausibly more frequent these days with more frequent remote purchases.
In tomorrow’s OT we’ll start discussing the second film in the SCC watch-along, “I Am Mother”. Let me strongly suggest that you watch the film before reading any of the posts in that subthread. “I Am Mother” is a sci-fi thriller, and there are some twists you wouldn’t want spoiled.
How would you find a copy of Behemoth by Hobbes published before 1924 for <$50?
I read Behemoth awhile ago and really liked it but when trying to find a copy I realized Project Gutenberg doesn’t have it. This struck me as odd, Behemoth is like 400 years old, and when I started researching I discovered that Project Gutenberg needs a physical copy before it can be put online and it needs the copy to have been published before 1924 so there’s no question as to the copyright situation.
I did some hunting on Biblio.com and one or two similar sites and it actually is difficult to find copies in this age range, they’re all either new copies for $10 or $2,000 antique copies from 16**. This is bugging me because it’s…just a wrong thing. Old books should be on Project Gutenberg.
Does anybody have any advice where I could find pre-1924 books at affordable prices?
Those are mostly going to be in antique collections or old book stores or university libraries. I have to imagine that there’s a lot more of them in England than here. New England, which imported the majority of books at the time, was so partisan against Hobbes’ side that it shipped soldiers back to England to fight and almost ignored the Restoration government as much as it could.
I’m surprised Project Gutenberg needs not just the work to predate 1924 but the exact copy – are they worried that someone might have added something to a post-1924 reprint that could still be under copyright?
Someone appears to have uploaded the text of Behemoth (among other things) from an 1839 collection of Hobbes’ work. That might be a good general strategy for finding lesser-known works – search for anthologies instead of the individual texts.
See PG’s Copyright FAQ C.16–19. That’s exactly the problem—modern publishers can and usually do add enough material to qualify under a new copyright. The main body of the book might be in the public domain, but you’ll have to prove it’s so. You can if for instance the book’s copyright lists it as a reprint of an edition in the public domain, but of course most don’t do that, either.
The Internet Archive has two copies of Behemoth, both of them from 1889. So step 1, locate a pre-1924 physical copy of Behemoth and scan it, has already been done for you. There is no need to buy anything.
If you want it on Project Gutenberg, it is now up to you to put it through the Distributed Proofreaders process. I recommend you use the second scan as a base, since it appears to be much higher quality than the first scan, and has already been OCR’d.
This was useful, thank you.
I wonder if they’ll accept it.
For those who wanted more technical information on the subpoena powers of the US Congress (anyone?), the court of appeals decision today seems to a be a source to get up to speed on the case law: Trump v Mazars
Because there was a dissent, the opinion has a presentation of both sides. Also, while that case was not related to an impeachment inquiry, there is a considerable amount of discussion of subpoena powers in that context as well.
Any constitutional law experts in the house who would care to comment on this opinion? As an experienced layman (I read a lot of opinions and legal briefs, but am not a lawyer), I found the majority opinion more convincing than the dissent. Even so, I can easily see this being taken up by SCOTUS and reversed.
Have a law degree, but am not a constitutional law expert, not that anyone will mistake me for one. It’s a super interesting topic to me (I’ve studied house committee investigations in the context of the Civil War, before it was a Trump-related controversy), so I will add my thoughts and hope this makes some sense.
I see it this general area as one where the rules are intentionally nonexistent, because when people have real ends in view, and think in terms of serving those purposes, the matter tends to settle itself. It’s not an objective issue. I keep seeing claims that Trump’s behavior “mandates” impeachment and all that. That is absurd–it is designed to be a choice. If we think of it as a system outside of human judgment, then we’re not going to make sense of it. The system doesn’t claim to override each action until the correct thing happens–it allows the chance for various branches etc. to correct another if it it chooses. As we’ve discussed in other contexts, our view of government, and some of the procedures themselves, have changed a lot, so some of this seems counter-intuitive.
The House has huge latitude here—it is incredibly easy for them to spend their time harassing everyone they feel like with document requests, and working up a narrative that cannot be corrected because there is no opportunity for a defense or need to issue a final report. They can run a smear campaign and then drop it–they did this during the war several times. It would be simply ridiculous to act like this is a totally neutral thing. One check on this is that they have limited time and effort, and so they have to at least be selective where they choose to form committees and hold investigations. This decision is often mostly political. This is why there was a norm against going after impeachable public officials directly. Get rid of them, using the process with some protections for the accused, or don’t get rid of them. You can’t have it both ways and constantly undermine confidence in the person without pulling the trigger, because that does more damage than anything else, arguably.
The House has wide authority here so that they don’t have to do a massive investigation in order to take action—they can just impeach. I realize that you may want to investigate further to decide whether to impeach someone, presumably after hearing an accusation against them, but in reality, it seems that the case is usually just going to be like with Trump: a major narrative is that Trump *should obviously* be impeached based on what we know–so why are they investigating? This isn’t an abstract exercise, and we can’t fish forever. What are they trying to substantiate? There are possible answers, but I think they vary a lot among congressmen. We want limits here–incentivizing unlimited fishing expeditions would not end well for anyone.
Buchanan is quoted:
Why not just cut to the chase, like in a (speedy) criminal trial—guilty or innocent? The rest is largely game-playing. It is quite easy for them to move ahead with impeachment proceedings, so they don’t need a bunch of time to get their facts straight on a serious accusation. That tactic is basically trial by court of public opinion. And that tactic is used a lot–game-playing is to be expected, and may be wise, depending on your viewpoint. But if it is game-playing, we should not be looking for objective procedural guidance that gives us the “right” outcome, no guaranteed enforcer. The sensible interpretation was that the House could make a stir, but not get documents if it was mainly making a stir or was already decided in its course and not looking to take action based on the information that might be in the documents. (“Even the Civil War and Reconstruction Congresses, which strongly asserted congressional power, adhered to the distinction between investigations for legislative purposes and investigations of illegal conduct by an impeachable official. For example, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War harangued non-impeachable military officers and articulated broad theories of congressional power, but never issued compulsory process to the President or sought to determine if particular civil officers violated the law.”) If the House is acting in bad faith in the executive’s telling, and the executive refuses to comply, it comes down to who is judged by the people to be the one truly acting in bad faith. If it is the president, the people don’t re-elect him, or their representatives impeach him before the next election.
In the case cited, the context makes it clear that it was believed Trump violated law with his payment to Cohen. It sounds like they knew enough to impeach on this already, if they thought it merited that. So why are they requesting the documents? To do a more thorough job and confirm the story? Okay, fine. But here’s what the committee told the court:
.
So far, so good, although this could have been done in an impeachment proceeding. The next line: “The Committee’s interest in these matters,” he stated, “informs its review of multiple laws and legislative proposals under [its] jurisdiction.” So the concern is making future laws, probably to ensure more stringent record-keeping (“These documents will help the Committee determine,” he explained, “why the President failed to report …payments and whether reforms are necessary to address deficiencies with current laws, rules, and regulations.”) This seems to be an entirely different purpose, an endless and vague investigation. They’re playing dumb. A certain amount of playing dumb if you follow the forms is allowed by the system, and is vital to its integrity—we need hard rules, not exploration of motives, in certain circumstances. I do not think this is one of them, and that is why we don’t have rules here—we want human behavior to unfold naturally. If they are seriously concerned, they impeach as a matter of course. If not, then they might be playing games. But we don’t have the court making an actual judgment on their motives—we understand the House acts politically most of the time, and that such things are subjective. It’s not about whether they are being political, but about whether they are being serious. Around page 23, it gets into its reluctance to defer to congress on what its “real object” is, because of the fact that the executive branch is deserving of equal indulgence in a conflict. But it notes a big issue here is that the guy being subpoenaed is not the president or an official, so maybe there is no conflict, and I think that is key. This case may not be a good predictive guide, but the discussion still matters. On Page 25, it claims that, fortunately, even without deference to Congress, the court believes the investigation has legitimate legislative (not impermissible law-enforcement) purposes. The court’s reasoning here is easy to follow, but it is really easy to come up with arguments to satisfy this line of reasoning.
During Polk’s time, some congressmen agreed with Polk that they could not get documents about Webster absent impeachment proceedings. Why? “Representative Adams maintained that an impeachable official ‘may not be reached by side-blows.'” And, “The Select Committee ‘entirely concur[red] with the President of the United States’ and his decision not to ‘communicate or make public, except with a view to an impeachment’ the document sought.” The question is whether the House is willing to make a real decision, facing the issue head-on and with some finality. I don’t see non-compliance as a crisis, but since many people do, and views of government have changed in key ways in the last century, I would not be surprised if compliance was ordered in some way. It seems like the court was willing to accept any justification from Congress, even if the president is the one subpoenaed. I didn’t parse the second half of the majority opinion closely, and may update my post after I review it. But from what I’ve read of Rao’s dissent, I agree with it—but I’m not surprised he’s in the minority. As Rao points out, they can’t keep the issues straight because they aren’t focusing on the purposes served:
Rao notes that despite insistence on both sides that this is not about impeachment, “the impeachment power unmistakably sits in the background of the legal arguments.” You’re not supposed to mix and match these things—there are essential differences. A footnote:
Why is it not fathomable? You can investigate without being able to subpoena everyone. This confusion is not something to encourage. I wouldn’t be shocked if the Supreme Court reversed–their reasoning is usually stronger than this.
Thanks for this. I think it fleshes out a lot of my thinking when I posted my first comment about the inquiry, particularly the passages about unlimited fishing expeditions and game-playing, including the most fruitful way to analyze what’s going on.
I’ll have to review this comment a few times – lots to think on.
To be honest, I’m surprised by your conclusions, especially given this comment:
though my confusion probably stems from not understanding the second and third clauses:
In particular, the first quoted piece seems to imply that there is no automatic on-ramp to impeachment. This seems the obviously sensible structure. If an official potential subject to impeachment were automatically driven into that process for any statutory violation, then a minor footfault (as the Trump declarations probably were) would lead to a major process, even if that violation was a consequence of the legislation having consequences that Congress had not intended.
Instead, it seems reasonable for Congress to inquire into the matter with the expectation that fixing the law would be the most normal outcome. Because that is/should be the overwhelming majority of Congressional activity, it seems very reasonable that should be the presumption and there should be a low standard of proof.
@Paul Brinkley
Glad it makes some sense to you–hope it still does after a few more reviews!
@jgr314
You are correct that I argue there is no automatic on-ramp. I might be mistaken, but I think you are saying that if they have to investigate, they shouldn’t be forced to begin impeachment proceedings, because that would be like having an automatic on-ramp. They should instead stay in a legislative role. Is that a correct restatement of your argument?
If so, my response would be that no one is stopping them from doing things in their legislative role. They just don’t have broad subpoena power in doing this. If they want to revise campaign finance laws or whatever, they can do that without these documents. The alleged violation was already known, with regard to the Cohen payment. Sure, there *might* be something new in the documents to address, but we don’t just hand over sensitive documents to anyone who is curious about what could possibly be in them. The police have to demonstrate probable cause–they’re not supposed to simply go poking around in everyone’s bank documents looking for suspicious activity, so that they can get ahead of it. (Sometimes this does happen, but it is controversial for obvious reasons). They can make new laws requiring disclosure of third-party payments (this may be impractical, but let’s pretend it isn’t). But to say “hey, we learned about this third party payment that violated our laws, so we need all the documents about the third party payment to decide whether we need to remember to look at third party payments in the future,” is excessive. They already know they have to do so. They’re asking for sensitive information–mere curiosity and research is not enough.
If their argument is, “hey, we learned about this third party payment that violated our laws, so we need all the documents about the third party payment to build a case against the current offenders and punish them,” then that is what impeachment proceedings are for. It’s sort of like saying you have probable cause. You’re declaring that things are getting serious, that you are going to commit to action. So they’ll give you sensitive information, but now there are some stricter rules in place. They are acting like police, not legislators.
When they ask for subpoena powers for documents related to impeachable officials, it suggests their purposes might not be legislative. Legislation is usually based on broader and more public information. That is how the norm developed—it seemed obviously inappropriate to many people in the 1800s to be casually looking for such information. The bar is indeed quite low, and they can investigate whatever they feel like. When they take this step, questions arise. The court in this case did not find the questions very troublesome, and you can certainly argue that the legislative role might give rise to the need for such documents in some cases. But I see that as a huge can of worms. The reason that presumption was not conceded even in this case is because of the possible conflict with the executive—most of the time, they defer to the declared purposes. The most normal outcome is that the executive takes care of law enforcement, while the legislative branch “fixes” the law. They are kind of vague about this, but I think they are trying to avoid the presumption that the executive is failing in this capacity such that congress has to jump in and overrule it. Congress is allowed to do this, *via impeachment.* Not just whenever it feels like it.
Nothing would force the House to begin impeachment proceedings lightly, nor would they be certain to succeed. There’s still no automatic on-ramp. The question is whether there are situations where they really *should have* these documents, but do not need to start impeachment proceedings. And whether, if you argue there are, this would not better be carried out by another branch.
It appears that you are arguing that Congress can only subpoena testimony when formally debating whether to pass articles of impeachment. That they can’t do so when attempting to decide if they desire to draft articles.
McGrain v. Daugherty , and the general history of the Congressional impeachment power, would seem to disagree.
I am spelling out that argument, noting that this was the position held in the nineteenth century, but that the interpretation has since shifted, and that this position appears to be rejected in the case cited by the OP. The comment you quoted was explicitly responding to a dissenting opinion in that case. I find the dissent more persuasive, and was agreeing with it that the majority’s statement seemed confused. I am aware that this is a dissenting opinion and am not arguing that it is the controlling precedent, although I believe it might become one.
I suggest reading the link in the OP, which goes into all of this in detail. It is super long, though, and I didn’t finish it myself. But there is some good stuff, and McGrain is discussed in detail. I’m very familiar with the history of the impeachment power, and some of it “would seem to disagree,” and some of it seems to agree, particularly during the 1800s. Obviously, things change, but the “history” of the matter does not come down clearly either way–or it comes down on both sides, I guess you could say.
Reviewing the majority opinion, I realize page 49 actually quite passionately refutes that part of the dissenting opinion. I don’t find it very persuasive, but certainly you have that case firmly on your side, and it covers all the main points. If it goes to the Supreme Court, it will be interesting.
I read this probably too quickly, and I don’t have the proper legal background to make a strong judgment as to whether the decision was correct or not. But I am going to stick my fingers in here anyway.
I was rather disappointed by the majority’s hand wavey arguments. They state that the legislature can only investigate those areas they could legislate. To me that means the investigation must aid in the legislation in some manner. The Trump attorneys argued that the investigation was about enforcement of the law that states that the President must provide certain financial information, which isn’t acceptable for the legislature to do. The case was about a subpoena to Trump’s accountants to provide financial information about Trump, since Trump was suspected of incorrect reporting of some of his financial status. It sounds to me like Trump’s attorneys had it right.
But the majority argued that the House can legislate about future laws related to required financial reporting, and in fact there were a couple of proposals in the House right now for new legislation. So there, the House is asking for this information to help them to draft this legislation! They met their requirement! Yeah, right. It strains my credibility that the House committee asked for this information to help them with pending legislation. Everyone knows they are trying to get dirt on Trump. Trump may well have cheated on his disclosures, but the court just said it isn’t the legislatures job to fix that.
OTOH, there is a real separation of powers issue here. If the Congress doesn’t investigate Trump, who’s going to do it? Is the Executive Branch going to investigate its own head? (And in fact the majority brought up this issue too, which kind of shows their fakery when they were pretending the investigation was for future legislation). Sure the House can impeach, and presumably investigate as part of the impeachment process. But as Brad says elsewhere, we shouldn’t have only a capital punishment for all Presidential crimes. I think Congress should definitely have the right to investigate possible fraudulent behavior of the President, without having to launch a formal investigation of impeachment, because who else is going to do it? Although it is also true there does need to be limits on this, because it will certainly be true in today’s environment, the House is likely to investigate with no limits the President of the opposite party, if they are allowed to do so.
Reading the case, it appears to me that House can only investigate ill-doings of the President when in impeachment proceedings, unless they can get hand wavey judges on their side.
Yeah, I was not impressed. In some situations, there is deference to administrative agencies or whatever that is pretty much absolute—“any rational argument you can generate suffices!” Had this been the case, fine. I think in one of the first “travel ban” cases, the court pointed out that in the past, presidents banned a lot of immigration solely for revenge against the decisions of leaders they were spiteful towards, and then claimed some implausible pretext as the real reason. But rational basis review applied–the executive has that power. It just wasn’t a high bar at all historically, and they admitted this and kind of eye-rolled at the childishness of some of the decisions. But this court acknowledges that this is not really one of these cases, and then declares itself convinced on the merits.
The issue is that many people assume *someone has to do it.* This is not the only position, though it is certainly an understandable one. What if no one investigates Trump any more than they already have? The 2020 election is not that far away. Impeachment is argued by many to be justified based on what we already have. If things are that grave, one of those options should be enough. If the public re-elects or impeachment is judged likely to backfire or the votes aren’t there (and the agonizing is in part driven by the idea that this is the case, I think), maybe it just isn’t that grave. The agonizing is in another part driven by the idea that there is some objective mandate where this *has* to happen. This isn’t true, or at least not obviously true. Perhaps there are things that are intolerable, but this isn’t a mistake in the system. If the public doesn’t support impeachment, then the system wasn’t designed to impeach, whatever the president’s conduct is. People may want a different system, but that is another discussion. The legislature’s powers are not clearly compromised–if they don’t think the people will back them up, and they choose not to impeach, this is not the executive abusing its powers. It is enough of the people making what some smaller number of people think is a bad decision. It was fully understood when the system was made that bad decisions might happen, and the hope is that the consequences lead to correction down the line, not that they are 100% prevented.
They can begin impeachment proceedings but not be successful in an impeachment. The investigation doesn’t mean the guy has got to go, if the votes aren’t there. What non-capital punishment are you looking for? This might be more of a problem if impeachment were actually a capital crime—the bar for first-degree murder is high. If you don’t have other options, you won’t get a conviction in many cases where a lesser charge would have served the purpose better. But the bar for impeachment is not that high, or at least it hasn’t been treated that way.
They can investigate this, but they don’t have broad subpoena powers unless they go to impeachment. If there are serious fraud suspicions, they probably should. The problem is that, as you point out, limits must exist. I think limiting subpoena power is a pretty reasonable limit. There is a strong case to be made for the opposite position, I think, but there is a strong case to be made for the House to have almost any powers to track down wrongdoing, if viewed in isolation. Why would we want to give anyone a pass on bad behavior? But if limits need to exist, sacrifices have to be made in effectiveness, like in the criminal justice system. I don’t think the investigation *has* to be done. But the whole question turns around this assumption. If we must make sure there is always a “monitor” to guard against wrongdoing, then we have a problem, because our system is definitely not able to do this–it was never intended to. The executive might behave badly, and the remedies are losing office through impeachment or losing the election.
Given how far we are away from the constitutional design, I’m inclined to think that if Congress rouses itself from its typical abdication and does something the courts should almost always back it.
Seems like the HHS bureaucracy has finally responded to frightened doctors discontinuing opiods of chronic pain sufferers too rapidly by issuing new guidelines.
Will doctors buy it and feel more freedom to prescribe, or will they still be too afraid to lose licenses and take guidance from state-level agencies?
Would there be any downside to progressive pricing for residential electricity? E.g. a household’s first 500 kWh / month costs $.05 / kWh, the next 500 cost $.10 / kWh, then $.15, etc.
Benefits:
– Lower monthly bills for low-income households (to the extent that low income households are smaller / use less energy)
– Stronger incentives to conserve energy, likely to reduce overall energy consumption on the margin
Costs:
– Higher bills for above-average energy consumers
Why isn’t this “a thing?”
What do you see as the overall objective? If it’s using less energy, you could just close down all the generators.
Looking at it as an economist, the best answer I can offer is that you want to maximize net benefit–benefit minus cost. Consumption of energy is a good thing when the value of consuming it is more than the cost, a bad thing when it is less. So you want to price energy at its cost of production—more precisely its marginal cost. Less than that means people use energy even when it is worth less to them than it costs to produce it, higher than that means they don’t use energy even when it is worth more to them than it costs to produce it.
So I agree this should be true from the perspective of the utility company (to the extent it is a public entity or a natural monopoly). It’s mission should be to meet the demand for electricity at the lowest possible cost.
But it’s not true from the perspective of broader society because basically all forms of electricity production have negative externalities. To the extent todays prices equal the marginal cost of production, they are too low (because they don’t account for those externalities). If you grant that, I think you will agree that we are collectively over-consuming electricity and that reducing that consumption would be a good thing.
It could be that increased consumption by currently low using households would more than offset reductions from higher-using households, but that’s an empirical matter that would be highly dependent on (a) the specific pricing regime and (b) any number of things we’re not going to model here. None of us really has the faintest idea (though we all have our gut instincts).
But yes, one objective of this policy would be to reduce electricity consumption.
Another would be to increase welfare for low income households by lowering their cost of electricity (or allowing for increased consumption at the same cost). To the extent this is worth raising prices on high income households… well your mileage may vary.
You might object that progressive pricing is not the “best” way to achieve either of those goals, and that I should instead push for a new energy consumption tax married to a new tax credit or something, IDK. And if you say we should do that, I agree! But it’s probably a lot less realistic than tweaking the pricing model, and “can be implemented” is kind of a big deal in public policy it seems to me.
That’s fair. But if that’s your concern, the solution would be to increase the price of electricity until the price reflects the externalities you are concerned about. Then people can allocate resources appropriately.
I wrote:
You responded:
Negative externalities are part of the cost of production.
I should add that I doubt your claim about all forms of electricity production having negative externalities is true. For one thing, we don’t even know if CO2 production has net negative externalities, although many people believe they do.
Another way to phrase this is that pretty much everything we do has some form of negative externality. It doesn’t mean we should lay down and die. For some it’s worth it, for some it’s included into the production cost. For some it probably isn’t, and that’s just a problem to be solved.
Also some form of positive externality. What matters is the net externality.
This is a point I keep making in the climate change context. We know climate change has some negative externalities–sea level rise and hotter very hot summers being the obvious examples. If you start out sure it is a bad thing, you look at those, add some less certain ones, and conclude that your initial belief was correct.
But it also has positive externalities–the effect of CO2 fertilization due to doubling CO2 concentration, which is about what the IPCC expects by the end of the century, is an increase in crop yield for most crops of abotu 30%, which is huge and very solidly established by experiment over many years. Pushing temperature contours towards the poles means a sizable expansion in land area warm enough for human use. Milder winters mean fewer people dying from cold–and, at present, many more people die from cold than from heat.
So whether net externalities are positive or negative is much less clear, and it’s pretty easy to convince yourself of either if that is what you want to believe.
For an entirely different case, consider the claim that schooling has positive externalities. Try thinking about negative externalities it might have. I had an interesting exchange on my blog with Robert Frank, pointing out that if his view, that who got what education determined who got which high paying job rather than how productive people were, was purely a fixed sum game, then we should tax schooling instead of subsidizing it. It was a straightforward implication of his stated view, which he was unwilling to recognize.
The posts.
I don’t grant any such thing.
Lower income households often use more energy than the tiers above them, due to often living in poorly isolated places that are harder to heat/keep cool.
Also, I’ve noticed a habit among low-income households where they keep one or more giant TVs on 24/7. I assume they don’t do much to conserve energy in other ways either.
Unless incentivized by government regulations, apartment builders and managers have no incentive to spend extra money insulating the apartments. They aren’t paying the A/C bills. And the apartment dwellers can’t realistically do more than tape the windows and weatherstrip the doors.
Though I knew one person who live in a third floor apartment and had to do almost no heating in the winter as the heat from the apartments below kept hers comfortably warm.
Unless you have rent control, that is false. Tenants are willing to pay more for a better apartment, whether that means more space, an elevator, or lower heating and air conditioning bills.
Consider the implications of your argument in other contexts. Do you think car companies won’t include radios in cars unless the government makes them? Restaurants won’t care how the food they serve tastes? What people are buying, whether housing, dinner, or a car, is a bundle of characteristics, and the value of that bundle determines what they are willing to pay.
I devoted one chapter of my price theory textbook to the economics of home heating, including apartments. One bit of the webbed chapter is wrong, and has been corrected in the edition I recently self-published (bringing the book back into print after two editions commercially published).
I have never, ever, ever seen a rental unit mention insulation, or average heating/cooling costs, in their advertisements or disclosures. This is not something rental units typically compete on. Why do they not compete on it? That’s a question I can’t answer. Maybe you have a better idea on how to answer it.
I have seen insulation inspected in home sales.
My argument is specific for apartment units. I have lived in two (in the midwest) within the last twelve years, then a condo rental in California, and am currently living in a non-apartment attached rental.
“I will derive the profit-maximizing rule by which the owner of an apartment building should decide how warm to keep the apartments.”
Okay. This is something else entirely. I have also never lived in an apartment in which the apartment manager/owner is responsible for heating/cooling, or electricity/gas costs in general. I assume it’s not typical, at least not in the Midwest.
@anonymousskimmer
FWIW, I have lived in an apartment where the landlord paid for heat (but not AC). It was in the NYC area (not the city itself). I think it was built in the 60s. Tenants could not control the heat, but they could control the AC (heat was baseboard radiators, AC was through the wall units).
> I have never, ever, ever seen a rental unit mention insulation, or average heating/cooling costs, in their advertisements or disclosures.
Huh. In the UK, they have to tell the prospective tennant the ‘efficincy rating’ of the property.
But you can probably guess roughly how well insulated it is by age, whether the windows are double glazed, single glazed or leadlined diamond-pane, etc.
I guess the lesson here is that standards differ when it comes to marketing (and original infrastructure with respect to whether heating/cooling is building-based or unit-based). So it’s not surprising that sellers would tailor their offerings based on these standards, and not mention the unmentioned standards.
@anonymousskimmer says: “…I have also never lived in an apartment in which the apartment manager/owner is responsible for heating/cooling, or electricity/gas costs in general…”
I lived for 17 years in Oakland, California in a 1920’s apartment building where electricity and gas was paid by the tenants, but water was included with the rent as was steam heat for a few hours a day for a few months out of the year, when the heat was on it quickly became uncomfortably hot, but while we could close the radiator valves in are apartment so it wouldn’t be too hot, we seldom did because once the heat was turned off it very quickly became cold enough to see your breath inside so we wanted our unit to absorb as much heat as it could while the heat was still on.
One way to glean more heat was to repeatedly fill the bathtub with hot water, and usually after a couple of months of cold weather the landlord would send the apartment manager to look for water leaks – not realizing that if he had the steam heat stay on longer during the day his water bill would be less.
Depending on outside temperature and what other forms of heating they have, that might not be unreasonable.
A giant TV, like most appliances, is just as efficient as an electric heater. (100%)
Mildly surprised it isn’t, actually. It is for water where I live.
It makes more sense for water than it does for electricity – water needs are pretty much the same across the board – drinking, personal hygiene, cleaning. Water wants scale considerably with wealth – gardening/irrigation, luxury baths, swimming pools, etc. Whereas with electricity this is somewhat so (wealthy implies bigger house with more lighting and luxury energy needs), but hugely offset but the upfront costs of making a house energy efficient (heating/cooling, more modern and efficient appliances, etc). I don’t think there’s an efficiency parallel for water – maybe if you have a slow but costly leak that needs a plumber to repair, but that’s going to be much rarer than having poorly insulated windows costing you in heating/cooling.
These could be worked around, I’m sure… but here’s a few reasons this could be difficult to implement off the top of my head:
1) Different family sizes mean different basic requirements
2) Different installed systems means differing needs. Where I live, people have heating accomplished by electricity, oil, and LP. They have cooking accomplished by electricity, natural gas, or LP. Their dryers run off either electricity or natural gas. Given this, its pretty hard to say how much electricity a household “should” use for setting your rate jumps.
3) Lower income people tend to live in older and less efficient homes and don’t have the money to pay for upgrades.
There was a longish discussion on this topic a few months ago. Longer than you’d think 🙂
Anyways, much agree with making the goal clear. What are you trying to do? Subsidize low income households? Lower overall energy consumption? Tax rich(er) people? Depending on the goal, you may find that it’s a good or bad idea, and there may be others much better.
For example if it’s the second, I’m going to reply that 1. energy consumption isn’t a bad thing per se. One could even say it’s a metric of a good life. 2. Households aren’t really the biggest consumer. 3. Lower households are more price sensitive than richer ones, so if you do this and keep the overall price constant, you’ll end up with more consumption instead of less.
Yes I think Radu has it right to ask what are you trying to do here? It sounds to me the purpose of what you’re doing is to subsidize the poor. IT’s a lot simpler to do that with welfare payments or some kind of centralized income redistribution scheme. We already have far too many schemes like this to redistribute income, so nobody knows how much re-distribution is going on in aggregate. IMO, all re-distribution should be done by one agency as centralized as possible, so voters can make rational decisions as to how to re-distribute. These ad hoc re-distributions simply cloud the data.
If your intent is to raise the cost of energy to cover externalities, it would much more effective (and much simpler) to simply add a percentage of tax on the energy.
The best data I could find in 5 minutes (graph on page 3) shows that electricity consumption increases with income up to 30k, is flat between 30k and 60k, and increases dramatically above that.
This sounds like a great way to disincentivise buying electric vehicles, I’m not sure that’s what we want? In the UK you have the additional problem that they want to nudge people with gas heating/cooking to switch to electric, because it reduces CO2 emissions (at least if you buy your electricity from the right place).
This progressive pricing model exists and is the default pricing model for PG&E in the Bay Area. They set a nominal baseline allowance that somehow factors in average use in your area, and the season. There are then 3 tiers of use, with the top tier being about double the price per kW compared to the bottom.
They also offer non-progressive pricing with costs based on peak hours, or a separate, more complicated plan for EV ownership (which I believe provided cheap incentives to charge at night, along with some progressive incentives otherwise).
Notably the baseline allowance being based on consumption in your neighborhood interacts with the economic stratification concerns noted above.
Came here to say this. You can read about it yourself here.
I also came here to say this. Where I live (southern outskirts of the Bay Area), EV owners can choose from two rate plans. One is a time-of-use one where there’s different hours and a bigger spread between the peak/semipeak/offpeak rates: from memory, offpeak costs about 11c/kWh, semipeak about 22c, and peak costs 44c. The other is a “split meter” program where your EV charger is metered separately and billed at a lower rate while the rest of your house is billed according to one of the normal rate schedules.
I think that if you have complete control over your taxation policy, this strategy is going to be dominated by a combination of a flat sin tax on energy and a progressive consumption tax on all goods.
But in practice, things like this may sometimes turn out to be the best thing it’s politically viable to enforce.
Why do you assume the use of energy is sinful?
I don’t, any more than I believe that smoking is sinful. “Sin tax” as I understand it is a standard form for a tax levied at a higher rate than economics alone would dictate on any behaviour society wishes to discourage.
In this case, use of energy derived from fossil fuels has obvious massive negative externalities, and while the best response would be presumably to tax that but not renewable or nuclear energy at the production stage, I’m not sure how the details of that would work, and a consumption tax on all energy might well still be simpler.
A sin tax is more about taxing behavior judged to be immoral. I think you’re looking for a Pigovian tax – a tax on something to pay for its negative externalities, in order to discourage it or to correct a market inefficiency. A Pigovian tax on fossil fuels would take into account the negative externalities (mostly, pollution of various sorts in production and energy generation) and pass the costs of those on to the user, rather than socialize the costs among all of society. This ought to lead to a more efficient market, since the price of the good or activity properly reflects its cost. It also leads to less of the thing being taxed, like a sin tax – a Pigovian tax is a form of tax imposed where the side effect of taxes (reducing consumption of the taxed thing) is the main effect of the tax, while the normal goal of a tax, raising revenue, is a side effect.
(It’s named after a Mr. Pigouv, apparently, explaining the odd name.)
The main problem with Pigouvian taxes is no one knows the value of the externalities. Usually not to within orders of magnitude, and (as in this case), often not even its sign.
Another problem is that you need to apply such taxes to all substitutes, or you can just make things worse. A toy example: Suppose you institute a Pigouvian tax on energy. A firm responds by switching from a high-energy-use hot water process to a low-energy-use cold water process. The latter process, however, uses twice as much water, and (from a God’s-eye-view) the externality from the water use is larger than the externality from the energy use. If you try to solve this by applying such taxes to everything, you run right into the first problem.
What do you mean by “what economics alone would dictate”?
Pigouvian taxes, which are what I think you are describing, have been part of conventional economics since long before I was born.
This is implemented in my part of California.
One result is to heavily disincentive smaller households from installing solar panels – they pay for themseleves much faster if your household is in a higher pricing tier without them.
Other than that, I haven’t spotted a downside, because the differences aren’t large enough to encourage people to reduce their household size – even though you get the same rate whether you have one person or twenty people consuming the same total amount of energy at a single residential address. (The extra costs of having a second household are going to be more than you’d save.)
One downside is that you create a basis for black markets – if I have a household that needs 900 kWh/month and you get by on 100 kWh, I can pay you between $0.05 and $0.10 to let me plug an extension chord in a socket in your house and draw 400 kWh from your quota. Which is a great arrangement, until our jury-rigged setup gets a short circuit and both our houses burn down.
Another downside is that incentives for alternative sources of energy or conservation are differentiated, even if I can insulate a number of low-energy apartments for the same price of one high-energy one, the latter may be more profitable.
And what is the upside, really? If you want to conserve energy, increase the price across the board, which will incentivize everybody to look for alternatives. If you want to help out poor people, give them money, and let them decide for themselves if they want to spend it on electricity instead of health, education, food, or what have you.
What’s the point of corporate buzzword complexes? Or whatever you call them–the assemblage of slogans, business philosophies, value statements, etc. that every for-profit company I’ve worked at has cultivated. Usually it’s fairly low-key, just a few official, bland statements that boil down to “don’t be immoral” and “be nice to customers,” only written in a style that reads like consumerist agitprop written by Ned Flanders (“We deliver an extraordinary customer experience with a smile!”). My current employer, however, is quite enthusiastic and actually quizzes us on these inane statements periodically.
I have never, ever encountered anyone who was sincerely impressed by this anodyne rubbish; the usual reaction is some mixture of annoyance, indifference, and contempt. We freely make fun of ours, since corporate is so determined to make us memorize the stupid things. I am as certain as I can be that they make no positive impact on our performance. My first reaction on joining on at Walgreens (former employer) and reading about “Our Values” was, “if I’ve gotten to working age without forming values of my own, these statements are not going to help, and you probably should not be trusting me to handle narcotics.” They’re also too vague to plausibly function as legal butt-covering in the same way that, say, sexual harassment education does.
My best guess is that, when corporate has politically connected but useless people it must employ, it puts them in the slogan department where the damage they can do is minimized; my current employer must have an unusually large or well-connected body of incompetents. If this strikes you as a needlessly cynical take on things, it’s not my fault. The slogans made me this way. Am open to alternative explanations, since corporations spend some amount of money on this crap.
Corporate culture is real, powerful and impressive.
Changing the corporate culture from a bad one to a good one would do more for the corporation than anything else you can do short of accidentally discovering a massive new market niche.
If you’ve ever worked at a place where everyone cares, is engaged and really feels their job has meaning, it’s impressive to see how much more they produce than anywhere else.
Corporate buzzwords are essentially trying to bottle that lightning by giving everyone a shared purpose for a rather mundane job. Nobody knows how to actually do that, so what you end up with is buzzwords.
Are there such places? Outside of charities and maybe political parties?
I used to think Google was such a place. If it ever was one, it certainly didn’t feel like one by 2010. (Or maybe I just didn’t fit in, and the culture ejected me three years later.)
Certainly. There are lots of companies that aren’t one of the largest/most influential companies in the world and I would probably start there.
I work for a company of about 20-25 people and it is very much that way (although we don’t have any terrible internal slogans for motivating people, everybody just tends to like working here and like or at least get along with each other).
Lost my last comment.
Yes, such places exist, I’ve worked for them and they’re great.
They are rarely (never?) political parties and probably also rarely charities.
And VERY rarely big companies.
Speaking as a customer, my impression is that some firms I deal with feel that way. The largest example I can think of is Southwest Airlines. Maybe it is all an act, but when I interact with individual employees they feel like people who are doing a job they like doing. A small example would be the lumber store I used to use in San Jose, which unfortunately closed down a few years back.
I wonder how many ex-Googlers we have here. I seem to remember at least one other commenter saying they were one; perhaps there are others.
A question for the next survey:
Are you of Google Facebook ... Shell Enron …
An employee
An ex-employee
Wonder what the results would correlate with (besides the obvious — but then: what is obvious for whom?)
100% this. There is a big difference between a healthy culture and a bad culture. No one really knows how to build a healthy culture, so you get Cargo Cult thinking like this. If you actually work in a healthy culture, these buzzwords are not buzzwords, they are actually guiding organizational values.
Slight addendum: we might not know EXACTLY how to create a good organizational culture, but we sure as hell have a few sign posts to follow. Problem is, following those sign posts typically upsets managers and workers, so no REAL effort goes into remaking the culture. Instead you get buzzword bingo.
What are the sign posts, out of curiosity?
-Empowerment, which means everyone at every level of the organization has decision rights over what they do, and the training to make good decisions
-Two way communication, which means you actually need to talk to your employees and let them talk back to you, and you need to actually listen to their input
-Walk the walk. You want to make sure people are on time to meetings? Then the boss is on time, too, and everyone is held accountable for being late, no matter what their performance is.
-People say what they mean and try to minimize politics. You can’t eliminate them, but if everyone is walking on egg shells or just shutting up entirely, you have a bad culture.
-Very limited use of the phrase “that’s not my job”
-Accountability. You need to hold people accountable for the things they don’t do.
-Recognition. You really need to recognize your employees, and that needs to be first, not an after-thought.
Problem here being that if you do this, sometimes they decide things other than the ways their superiors would decide things. If these work out badly, that’s bad. If they work out well… even worse, from the point of view of the superior.
The problem with this is pithily summed up by various formulations of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Celine’s Second Law”. One is “Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation”, and another is “communication occurs only between equals”. Your employees realize their communication has at best the dual role of providing information about the thing communicated, and information about the employee to be used in judging the employee. Naturally, since you have control over their continued employment and compensation, the employees will be very aware of the latter and will try to tell you what you want to hear.
Rank Hath Its Privileges. Bosses will always have excuses for breaking their own rules; many of them might even be valid, though they would not accept even these valid reasons from their employees. But much of the point of having rank is to have the privileges, so this one is no good.
If you mean company politics, they’re unavoidable in a company with more than 2 people, and everyone is going to be aware of them as with the “two-way communications” issue. If you mean outside politics… well, we’ve seen how the culture war goes.
IMO the taboo on this phrase is quite damaging. I understand why it exists, but if you don’t use it, you’re going to get stuck doing everyone else’s job (in a more-or-less-functional company, worse than they would have done them), having this affect negatively the jobs you are supposed to do, and being penalized for it by your superiors. If the superiors also penalize you for refusing jobs not within your area of responsibility, you’re in a no-win situation; the best you can do is try to fob off jobs on other employees the same way.
Since there’s a whole universe of things any given employee doesn’t do, this quickly starts to look like arbitrary punishment for failure to mind-read one’s superiors.
This conflicts with the observation that the people who take credit for themselves first and foremost get the promotions. The usual way out is for the manager to recognize the employees in cheap ways (e.g. oft-derided plaques, sometimes small one-time bonuses) while getting that big promotion themselves. However, employees usually figure out what’s going on anyway.
I would disagree with that. Sure, no organization could live up to the standard that the rules are for everybody, no exceptions. But this isn’t all or nothing. It can be a question of how often, for how big a boss, and for how major a reason exceptions are valid. The answers, in a company with a healthy culture that leans toward the egalitarian, should be rarely, only for the biggest, and only in situations of clear need. There’s no reason why you have to run a company by, “The strong do what they want, and the weak endure what they must.”
“Punctuality is the courtesy of princes.”
Nybbler, your entire post is correct, in a company with a bad culture. But there are companies where volunteering to take on a bit of additional work does not mean you are loaded with that work forever, where you can give bad news to your boss or even disagree with your boss and are not punished, where you are held accountable to key standards and not everything under the sun, and where leaders respect their subordinates instead of invoking rank for special privileges.
These are companies with good cultures. They do exist, but they take work to enforce. Because if your staff or your front-line managers or your senior managers are routinely flouting your culture, you need to fire them, and you need to fire them even if your KPIs suffer. They are killing your company culture, and your company culture is an asset as big as your physical assets (probably more important for knowledge-based companies). You wouldn’t keep a freakin’ arsonist on staff just because he helps hit your KPIs for a little while, and Bad Culture Fits are just mini-arsonists.
Perhaps there are such cultures. I suspect my model is the modal one in any company with more than 20 or so people. I wish it were otherwise, because honestly it’s plain _exhausting_ to constantly be on one’s guard in conversations with superiors, trying to both obtain and/or report the information needed to do the job, and to make sure this does not weigh badly when performance evaluation time comes around. But that’s just part of the job, and one other personality types manage effortlessly.
I also cynically suspect that if you were to somehow get an honest answer from employees about whether their company had a “good culture” by your criteria, you’d find those answers to be highly correlated with management rank.
(And of course if there was such a company, the last thing it would ever do is hire the jaded veterans of the others; you don’t hire Dilbert’s Wally if you don’t want a Dilbert culture)
This seems analogous to difference between high-trust societies and low-trust societies. At some companies there is sufficient incentive alignment between all players combined with good starting values to allow a “high-trust society” of corporate culture to exist. The employees work to create value because they agree it’s in their best interest. They fraternize because they like each other, and the work.
Early Google is maybe the archetypal example here, that other companies will try to emulate, to greater or lesser effect. It works well with equity incentives, and is more common at smaller ventures. Of course, the same concept of cohesion and incentive alignment within an organization is well known in other contexts, eg morale in a military unit, or when a sports team is playing well together.
On the opposite end of a scale, there can exist “low-trust society” corporate cultures, where individual players work against each other for their own benefit. Uber’s engineering department (and indeed the whole company) was/is notorious for this, and “fiefdoms” are a common concept in large corporate dynamics. Extreme versions of this can be associated with large corporate failures, eg the culture of deadlines and cost cutting at Boeing before the 737 MCAS disaster.
The modal culture isn’t a good culture, but it’s not a toxic culture. If you’re constantly lying to your boss, that’s not normal. Typical bosses are not going to burden you with so much work that you miss key deliverables, because missing key deliverables looks bad on them as much as it looks bad on you. They may not reward you properly, but they certainly don’t want to see you fail, because that involves them having to do more work to “manage performance.”
One of the best things that I took from looking at conservatism as a philosophy was that it asked questions like: What is the value of social trust? What does it enable? What increases or decreases social trust?
Unfortunately, since anything other than GoodThink appears to have been tabooed from corporate discussions, it isn’t nearly as well-considered as it might otherwise benefit.
I’d say it’s more that following the signposts you mention is hard. Communication takes time, accountability is difficult, and empowerment means risk. these things aren’t impossible to do, but they’re tough because so many incentives run the other way. My company is currently fucking up a major internal project. I’ve flatly said to people at my level and up that even if we bring it to completion, getting what we’re getting at more than than double the original timeline and budget is not an achievement, that this is a failure that we need to own up to. These are all people that I very much respect, that care a great deal about their jobs (in the sense of wanting to do them well), many of whom are famous names in our industry, and the most common response I’ve gotten is shoulder shrugging that things won’t change, and admonitions that I’m a leader and can’t talk like that to the rank and file.
From my experience, the most important part of building a positive corporate culture is hiring people that already have that cultural mindset. So when someone says a job candidate isn’t a “cultural fit”, that is a completely legitimate (and quite good) reason not to hire someone.
@Urstoff.
Theoretically I agree with you. But can companies really tell if someone has a positive culture mindset? In my experience, no. When I work for a company, I feel obligated to try to advance the goals of the company, because that is what I am being paid for. But when I interview for jobs, I have been turned down quite often for not being a good fit. I think a good fit means a bubbly personality or someone who’s fun. Positive corporate culture has nothing to do with it.
And here i thought diversity was supposed to be a goal?
I don’t know what influences “normal” people, but I always compare what my employer does with what it says, and give much more weight to what it does. I also react especially badly to contradictions between them, as those often trigger my “the boss is lying to me” reflex.
I believe that’s unusual, and probably a symptom of being on the autistic spectrum. Possibly some normal people – maybe even most of the kind that work in HR departments – react positively to sloganeering.
Or at least playact at it because they believe that’s how to get ahead.
(Story as misremembered by me): The CEO of a large company I worked for once talked about the process they went through as a part of developing company culture involved developing the whole missing statement thing. One the employees stood up and asked “how will this be used against us?” It stopped the CEO in his tracks. The idea that employees might not only not buy into what they were creating, but that it would consider it to be hostile wasn’t something he’d considered. It caused him and the executive team to re-think both what the concept of a corporate values meant, but also leadership. You can’t impose values top-down, but you can lead them. I had a great deal of respect for the CEO.
I have a great deal of respect for the employee! But also for the CEO, for recognizing it…although people running large organizations should not be blindsided by such an idea.
Mission statements/core values are inherently creepy and should set off those alarms, IMO. They do in many people, but corporate culture selects for those who aren’t too bothered, and normalizes it for many of the rest. If you aren’t already clear on those things, it is a sign of bigger issues. In a large organization, or one with new people, I can see how you need to get everyone on the same page, but it really does not need to be that complicated and ritualistic. It should be a natural conversation about priorities and focus and how the pieces fit together. I know this is sadly rare.
Mission statements and core values are probably more useful for people who are developing strategy. Lower level employees do not develop strategy, they perform functions.
I know exactly what you mean. Maybe it’s what happens when you try to take a simple and direct statement and workshop it through HR, PR, marketing, etc. for months.
This is part of it (although I think this is mostly talking about internal slogans, so I think it is mostly just HR and various management levels). Also, creating slogans (especially new/original ones) is hard, so it isn’t surprising necessarily that when companies try to make up slogans/buzzwords or whatever that they suck at it.
I also suspect there is an element of people with power having bad ideas for slogans, but “hey, that slogan sucks” seems so important that nobody wants to fight them on it so everyone just rolls with it.
CEO*: We should put posters all around the building with “Do it!” all over the building and include it as a theme in our new training materials to remind everyone that they need to get the job done no matter what!
Everyone else: “Sure!”
Everyone else (mumbling later): “Man that is dumb”
I don’t think it really has anything to do with political connections.
*Or someone high up but slightly lower depending on the size of the company.
Sounds also a bit like Abilene Paradox.
Even near the windows on the higher floors? ‘Coz that seems like a really bad idea…
I generally agree with your sentiments, but to make it interesting I also have two counter-examples:
I worked at a small company where we had some buzzword complexes, but they were very carefully thought out and worded, and we were all invited to philosophize and discuss and develop them. We actually did live (or at least work) by these complexes, and we were proud of them. I still regard them highly even today.
OK, but that was a small company, not a big one. Enter my next job right after that, at a huge (Fortune 200) corporation where they cultivated a large buzzword complex. While we (the scores of people I met/worked with — obviously I didn’t talk to all XX-thousand employees) would on rare occasions mock them or say the slogans in ironic contexts to be funny, most of us did actually seem to like and agree with the complexes, and would often relate what we were doing back to them. Now, my impression was that these were above-average complexes, based on very good ideas. There was even some overlap with the stuff I’d been exposed to at my previous job at the small company.
Also want to add this:
I have a hunch that a lot of the dumbest stuff that goes on at companies is the result of executives watching inspirational TED talks, getting amped up, bringing in executive consultants who either are the people who gave those TED talks or people pedaling the same stuff as the TED talkers, and the consultants sell the executives on a whole suite of BS backed up by “data” which the executives are too enthusiastic and/or innumerate to question.
That is basically education “research” in a nutshell.
The latest idea that has reached my place is Power Posing, which shows they’re not even watching the latest TED talks.
I think there are impactful slogans and so forth. Ones that do provide a succinct way of introducing a real cultural difference between that company and other companies. They are usually the controversial ones: move fast and break things. We’re not a family, we’re a team.
Other companies want the esprite de corps associated with these highly performing companies, but don’t have the courage to do things differently, so they mimic the form but not the substance, and you get the workshop words that boil down to “be nice but also productive.”
How is it different from buzzword complexes in primary school? Pep rallies and cheerleaders and bandstands and such. Sure, the majority of people might not be swayed by a sports cheer, but for the few people who are, it can make a big enough difference in their morale. And while we may not be affected by buzzword complexes for sportsball or our day jobs, you can’t tell me that there isn’t a niche where you tag onto the buzzwords, such as the jargon of your favorite insight porn sources, or the memes of your particular fandom.
The value of a buzzword complex is neutral to positive. They would have to seriously botch implementation (lacking enforcement of when employees outright do things against those values, for example) for there to be an actual negative effect. So why not have one?
There is also negative impact when the upper management conspicuously doesn’t practice what they’re preaching. When the buzzwords are waved around as an incantation for “work harder and longer hours without increased compensation” morale goes down. Your highest producing people feel squeezed and move on.
Yes, that’s what said in my second paragraph. There is a negative impact if the buzzword complex is actively flouted. The probability of this seems to be dependent on industry and company size, though.
There are people whose duties at least partially consist of creating good corporate culture. On the rare occasions when they are good at what they’re doing, they may actually succeed. In all the other cases they pretend to be useful by inventing and promoting slogans you’re talking about.
The book-length version of Moral Mazes touches on this. Less in the HBR version, though.
Is it really this bad? I work in academia, and haven’t really risen much above the basement level. Nevertheless, bosses have limited power, both since money is brought in by individual researchers via grants, and since the publication track record is evidence of the employee’s performance.
Two-thirds of the way through Kochland which is mesmerizing and infuriating at the same time but it keeps me occupied on an hour-long run.
Charles Koch built an enduring corporate culture which has remained remarkably durable and consistent (which includes ignoring all externalities of his corporate activities – but at least he’s consistent!). He built this culture by hiring people that he believed (and his close associates in the C-suite believed) would be likely to align themselves with his philosophy. Every employee at Koch then goes through a period of indoctrination (not casting a negative light – it’s just the most descriptive term). Those that can’t adopt this culture as their own appear to be gone after a short time.
While certain ‘buzzwords’ are part of the Koch culture, they serve as the indicators that you are aligned with the Koch way.
I don’t know if Koch Ind is the textbook example of how to develop an enduring corporate culture but the company is wildly profitable and continues to grow. How and whether it will do so when Koch is gone I suppose is the question of whether the culture was truly successful.
It’s a test of conformity.
Like in dictatorships where you have to recite the party slogans even when everybody knows they’re bullshit, indeed precisely because everybody knows they’re bullshit. By reciting the slogans anyway, you submit to the party, publicly acknowledging their power over you.
A company is a limted scope dictatorship, hence its internal social dynamics work in the same way. You recite the company slogans, which everybody understands as inane, to signal that you are a team player rather than a free spirit troublemaker.
This sounds good but does not mesh with my experience. My current employer strikes me as pompously dumb but not malignant; they could be squeezing the blood out of us more aggressively than they do, but they use the slogans more than anywhere else I’ve worked at. Walgreens, on the other hand, was run by total rat bastards at the time I quit, and barely used the slogans at all. In fact, they’d backed off the cult-culture somewhat; before I joined, they expected you to greet people with “be well.” You had to periodically learn about Our Values as part of your sort-of-annual automated training, but the rest of the year it was just “here’s your job, do it.”
Come to think of it, Chick-fil-A seems to run a very effective corporate cult. It’s one of the few fast food chains where the employees never seem to be contemplating suicide on their lunch break. Anybody know how they do it?
Be a refuge for people with certain beliefs, for whom suicide is a sin?
I wonder also if since they’ve already decided to leave money on the table by not opening on Sunday, it’s easier for them to not do toxic stuff like scheduling people on short notice? I think it’s the little things that demonstrate complete inconsiderateness for your work force that can be the most morale-killing. You can have people shovel shit for 8 hours a day without wanting to shoot the place up if you at least treat them with respect.
I don’t know, maybe CFA does use the scheduling software to try to get every last nickel, and make up for it in other ways. I’m just spitballing.
At something of a tangent …
My main fiction reading for the past month or so has been Cherryh’s Foreigner series, now up to nearly twenty books. It’s set on a planet inhabited by humanoid aliens, with one island, about the size of New Zealand, occupied by human colonists from a colonizing starship that got lost two hundred years earlier and found the alien planet. Very good.
The alien society is a believable picture that does not fit very well our categories of capitalism/socialism, democracy/aristocracy, and the like. Almost no war, but legalized assassination as a substitute, with very restrictive rules. Boundary lines that are fuzzy, because it is the line on one side of which a bit over half the people feel allegiance to one lord, on the other side a bit under half.
One of the several things Cherryh does well is give you a picture of how a well functioning household, meaning a lord’s family and fifty plus servants, bodyguards, etc., works. Which is close to the discussion here of how a firm with a good corporate culture works. Working is particularly important given that a servant who you mistakenly believe is loyal to you may actually be loyal to someone who, at some future point, decides he would like you to be killed.
Very good books–but Cherryh in general is an able and interesting writer.
Preselection. Their explicit, in your face Evangelican Christian culture turns away people who are more likely to be depressed.
That probably helps a lot, but if it was terrible to work there, you’d still get a significant fraction becoming depressed–horrible work environments have a significant impact on life satisfaction. I mean, you spend a quarter of your life there, after all.
This could be explained by high turnover, of course. You get non-depressed people and push them out the door when the get depressed. Does anybody know if there are turnover statistics to support a hypothesis like this?
I can imagine people being happier when surrounded by co-workers and customers who almost homogeneously share their moral code.
@anonymousskimmer, maybe, but that’s not the case in Chik-Fil-A. There’re crowds of people eating at my local Chik-Fil-A who aren’t evangelical Christians, including – to my explicit knowledge – one former coworker of mine who went there for breakfast almost every day.
There’re a lot of workers there who aren’t either, according to a former friend of mine who was a shift manager.
@ Evan thorn
Your response right below this point was more then enough to show why I was wrong. 🙂
I used to be friends with a Chik-Fil-A shift manager. She described how the corporate headquarters does in-depth management training, both for her level of management and – much more – for franchise owners. In addition, they require franchise owners to make that single Chik-Fil-A building their full-time business and be regularly present there, so trained management will be at least in sight of the trenches seeing the consequences of their decisions.
I agree: Chik-Fil-A does culture right. And they do it in a way incompatible with a lot of corporate business models.
It’s a cargo cult. Good companies with good cultures and good products and good etc etc produce good employees. They’re more pleasant to interact with, work harder, do more with less, etc. All companies want this but not all companies understand or are capable of replicating this. What they do have is the ability to make their employees comply with anything they can outwardly see/measure. So they put out detailed guides on how to act like those good employees at those good companies and then are baffled at why they haven’t got a similarly good culture. But because they have a bad culture, they have a bad culture at the top too and that means people have the same bad incentives that prevent the problem getting fixed or even noticed.
Honestly, bad culture is usually a failure to imagine their employees complexly. This isn’t to say they dehumanize them exactly: it’s not that they hate their employees or think they’re all stupid. Well, some do. But most say things like, “Oh, it’s a minimum wage job they’ll hold for three months. They’re not going to care about it or do a good job.” or, “Women love our strong public commitment to anti-sexual harassment policies.” or, “People don’t take risks because of a personality type. We just need to change hiring for more go-getters.” Things that reify the employees into uniform stereotypes.
Good companies understand their employees are people. And I don’t mean in a bleeding heart way: good companies often fire people, or pay them minimum wage, or demand long hours. But they understand they are asking something of a human being with their own goals, needs, and incentives. They understand the employee has a connection to the company that is both economic and emotional. So they create an environment that aligns the employee with the company and rewards them for doing what the company needs done.
No one is ever impressed by a new corporate slogan. At least not for more than a minute or two if it’s clever. But people are impressed by corporate culture all the time.
Sometimes you hear that a study was funded by Big Widget, so people are dubious about its findings interpretable as pro-widget.
If Big Widget was highly motivated to get this research, couldn’t they just fund a few dozen studies, then choose the best one to continue to prosecute? There’s no way to learn about the others, right?
There’s a number of examples of such behaviour (mostly from the pharmaceutical industry) given by Ben Goldacre in the book Bad Science (highly recommended, as are any speeches you can find by him like this one, although it’s about placebo/nocebo effects, not concealed studies).
It’s somewhat difficult to conceal entire research programs, but with enough NDAs and captive workers (in the sense that they depend on Big Widget for their money, not in the prisoner sense) it can be done, and almost certainly is.
Given our survivalist discussion below, California is experiencing its largest power outages since… a long time, maybe since it was electrified in the first place.
I would love to hear from the Californians here about it. I genuinely don’t know much and would love to be educated.
They might have trouble communicating much about it, because of the power outage.
I kid, I kid.
In my social media circles this is pretty much universally being represented as due to privatization and the sale to PG&E of most of the power grid. I have no idea where to even begin looking to verify if this is a reasonable complaint.
Over time, it seems like more and more third-world-level dysfunction and kleptocracy show through holes in the “first world industrial democracy” overcoat we like to wear.
Is that really true, though? I’m inclined to think that 100 years ago there must have been a lot more corruption and kleptocracy and dysfunction in American government than there is now. Maybe there was a local minimum somewhere in the last 30 years, but I’d be surprised if the general trend for that stuff was actually upward.
The editorial commentary I am seeing is elaborating on this by saying it’s all PG&E’s fault because they are so cheap they still use this antiquated “grid” thingy to deliver power when they should have taken all the fire-sensitive communities off-grid and given them nice safe solar and wind power with on-site battery backups(*).
This is not a reasonable complaint. The same things that make these areas both fire-prone and populated, also makes them bad candidates for solar and wind power, particularly for nothing-but-solar-and-wind power. You’re still going to need power lines to bring power in from the solar farms in the desert, or from the fossil-fuel plants you’ll have to fire up when the solar panels on the shady forested hillsides prove to be inadequate.
There’s no way to run power lines to someplace like Paradise with zero risk of sparking a fire during the windy days of the dry season, or at least not at any cost PG&E’s customers will tolerate without running to Sacramento demanding nationalization. So if you also impose multi-gigabuck strict liability for any fire that starts near a live power line, then yes, the power lines are going dark when it’s dry and windy.
* Specifically lithium-ion battery backups, because every critic wants the New Shiny, and did these people not get the news about lithium-ion batteries being randomly-igniting incendiary bombs that they want to park in fire-prone areas?
No way to run them aboveground, at least. As I understand it PG&E is finally, over the next five years (!), going to bury Paradise’s grid.
How many active fault lines is that going to run through, I wonder?
SF Bay Area resident here. The outages result from a combination of paranoia and institutional incompetence.
The paranoia comes from the fact that we had two horrendous wildfire seasons in a row; last year the air was Beijing-level bad for weeks on end from all the smoke and at least one entire large town (Paradise) was basically wiped out. Many of these fires were sparked by power lines contacting vegetation. The root cause is some combination of:
— climate change making our late-summer/fall weather hotter and drier
— incompetent power line maintenance on the power provider (PG&E)’s part
— incompetent forest maintenance on the forest maintainers’ part. In fairness it is politically very difficult to maintain fire-prone forests competently, due in part to…
— increased residential construction in fire-prone areas, because these areas are often beautiful hilly forested places that are wonderful to live in when not on fire, and also because political unwillingness to densify existing urban areas forces new development out to the edges.
PG&E has faced a series of extraordinarily expensive lawsuits stemming from their role in the previous years’ fires and other disasters like pipeline explosions.
So, the pendulum swung the other way this year and they were determined to do everything possible to avoid being the cause of large wildfires, including preemptively cutting power to lines that run through fire-prone areas when the weather is hot, dry, and windy in those areas. This causes large, long-lasting power outages because:
— Cutting power to those lines has knock-on effects to the grid generally, necessitating power cuts even to dense urban/suburban neighborhoods well away from fire-prone areas.
— Once you cut the power to a line like that, you apparently have to inspect it visually before turning the power back on. I’m not sure why, but maybe there is some special spark risk from turning on power to a line that exceeds the normal risk of keeping the power on. The inspection is difficult and time-consuming because the power lines tend to run through rugged wildlands.
There is now a tremendous debate about whether this latest was an overreaction and what we can do to make future outages less necessary. Line maintenance is an obvious step but it’s unclear how much risk reduction you can get out of it. Burying lines works better long-term but is super expensive up front. Ditto for reconfiguring the grid so these lines are less necessary in the first place (which may require putting separate microgrids in some places).
On the bright side, this season has been an order of magnitude less bad so far than 2017-2018 (fingers crossed). No megafires, smaller fires quickly contained. Of course it is impossible to tell whether that’s due to the outages because there are so many confounders: a wet winter, cooler summer/fall weather, more prescribed burns, etc. If some future season sees megafires in spite of precautionary outages, then things will really get nasty and panicky.
Could there also be a secret plot to cause outages in order to incentives people to install residential solar?
“Could” in the sense of “is not logically impossible”, then yes. “Could” in the sense of “there is some form of evidence suggesting this is what happened” – not as far as I’m aware.
The explanations given are pretty straightforward. Companies don’t like losing billions of dollars.
Solar business is doing pretty well, due to recent state laws and utility company incentives.
No, because they aren’t installing residential solar in a way that allows for independent power generation/storage during outages. All residential solar power goes into the grid, so during an outage, those panels are essentially disconnected from even the house they’re installed on.
The exception is houses that have battery backups, e.g. a Powerwall, that can not only buffer an outage but recharge from the panels during an outage. This is the combination you need for real resilience, and it certainly is available, just rare and fairly expensive.
The reason is because of the way power line protection systems work. If the line is energized, a line contacting the ground or vegetation will result in an increase in current flow due to the fault (or difference in flow between the two ends of the line) and trip the protection systems to isolate the line. Energizing the line without inspection runs the risk of “energizing into a fault” and causing the very thing that turning off the line was supposed to avoid.
You left off one explanation I have seen, that environmentalist pressure against logging resulted in a buildup of inflammable deadwood.
Perhaps an example of the fact that what explanations you see for a problem depends in part on the political/ideological filters for the information you get. Exactly the same problem can be viewed as due to too much X or too little X.
Rather like the problem with fruit trees–it isn’t easy to distinguish the symptoms of too little watering from those of too much.
Environmentalist pressure against logging probably didn’t help, but I’d bet on a hundred-plus years of zero-tolerance policy for wildfires being the main cause. I’ve got a book somewhere with a couple hundred shots of Western wilderness taken in the late 19th/early 20th century (i.e. before intensive logging) compared with shots of the same locations a hundred or so years later, and the differences are dramatic: the 19th-century forest was much more open, with much less undergrowth, and taller trees but also more space between them. The book claims this is mainly due to wildfire suppression in the interim, and most of the other sources I’ve read agree.
PG&E has screwed up by the numbers before. Consulting only my own experience, power was extremely unreliable for about 2 years perhaps 20 years ago, around about the last time it declared bankruptcy (2001). In that case the result was rolling blackouts, not a gigantic solid blackout, and communication about it was less bad.
I’m not in the affected area, but other folks in my city (and county) are (the nearest affected area is about 2 miles from my house), and communication about which places would be affected has been extremely poor. PG&E’s web site collapsed, and various local government departments, which should have known better, did things like sending out misleading notifications, at midnight, to the wrong people, strongly implying their power would go out within the next few minutes. (It didn’t.)
Fortunately, another member of my household follows a local newspaper which copied and republished PG&E’s map, and was able to keep its own website up throughout the crisis. I was able to use their site to determine that none of my workplace, my home, or anywhere I had errands in the next couple of days would actually be affected, unless PG&E widened the area effected.
The other thing I’d note is that although parts of my city/county were affected by the power cuts, there was never any really significant wind here. We’ve had windstorms before; I had to get my roof repaired after the last one. The Bay Area is full of microclimates, so there may have been bad wind elsewhere – but there was no wind storm where I live.
Yep, this is the thing that’s way more glaring on PG&E’s part, how horribly managed these outages have been from a logistical standpoint. Really important places that could have set up independent generators weren’t given nearly enough advance notice to make those preparations, and, of course, the PGE website is a trainwreck from top to bottom.
I’m pretty sure I recall PG&E telling everyone in California a year ago that 2019 was going to have major grid shutdowns on very short notice in fire-prone areas across Northern California. How much time did these “really important places” need?
If the idea is that, when PG&E determines that it will be specifically necessary to shut down Sonoma on Tuesday due to high winds, they are to give everyone in Sonoma two weeks’ notice to go out and make alternative arrangements, then that’s not PG&E screwing up. That’s the US Meteorological Service being wholly inadequate for the task and/or the Lord God Almighty being an insensitive mercurial jerk with this “weather” stuff.
What surprised me is that my employer – multiple sites, lots of generators, lots of IT people – didn’t seem to know which of its sites were going to be affected until after at least the first round of cuts was due to start, judging by their communications to employees.
I imagine they’d have cut over to generators smoothly, keeping the system up on battery power until the generators kicked in, with or without notice, and also managed a more or less orderly evacuation of any areas not supported by backup power. (Their priority would have been to keep the servers up, not to keep all the employees at their desks with light and power…)
But it still seems sloppy – of PG&E, not them – that they were unsure which buildings would be affected.
I wrote most of this before my work start time and I had too many emergency service orders at once to finish this before the coffee break and I see now that I’m repeating some info that’s already been posted, but I don’t feel much like doing all of that much editing to avoid repetition
@EchoChaos >
Epistemic status: Impressionistic, I didn’t bother to research any of it I’m just going by what I’ve heard on the radio, gab the one co-worker who had his power shutoff, and viewing a headline.
The lights are still on in San Francisco and at my house but most of the Republicans on the crew live in the predicted effected area, and most of the Democrats don’t (see what residential political sorting does!) only one guy I know has lost electricity for a day so far, but the radio reports that thousands are in the dark, and some places will have no power for five days (or until inspections are done).
Some history: Back around 2007 a downed power line of “investor owned utility” (a phrase I’m now hearing used) San Diego Edison in southern California caused, and according to our Governor (on the radio yesterday) they now do some “de-energizing” but they haven’t had much problems or lengthy outages since, but here in northern California things are different. Around 2010 in San Bruno (a suburb between San Francisco and San Jose) a big 1950’s Pacific Gas & Electric Company gas line exploded causing lives and homes to be destroyed and the State demanded more pipeline inspections and better record keeping, last year there was the “Camp Fire” which destroyed thousands of homes, and even though it was more than a hundred miles away for a couple of weeks I could smell smoke at work and my house, filter masks were worn be a lot of folks, staying indoors with windows closed was advised, the sky was hazy, and ash covered my neighborhood. A judge ruled that high winds downed a P, G, & E power line, and that combined with low humidity caused a massive fire and the company had to pay for damages, so invester owned utility P, G & E went into bankruptcy.
This year with low humidity, a bunch of months without rain (the usually word for that is “summer”), and predicted high winds P, G & E decided to shutoff power to a bunch of places so another fire doesn’t spark as a precaution and not re-energize until after inspections and the winds die down.
Yesterday our really ticked off sounding Governor announced that he’s having State employees also look for downed powerlines (mostly by helicopter) “even though it’s not our responsibility” to speed up how fast inspections are done (I’m reminded of how part of the court areas at work are assigned to be repaired by a private contractor, but they always want “the county” (me) to shutoff water first, and the majority of the time I wind up just doing the repair myself instead of waiting for them, and then I beg for parts from them after they show up). The Govemor said “This won’t be the last time we have a dry summer, low humidity, and high winds, and we can’t let this be the new normal”, and he contrasted P, G & E with other private company utilities in the State, and he listed some “Tech” companies that the State got to help get the P, G & E website back up so people could see where likely shutoff will be (my wife was among the thousands who found the site had crashed when she tried to see if we were scheduled to be effected, so I looked at a map in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper and say that we were probably too far from the hills to be shutoff, but still close).
As far as I know the City of Alameda (the town that time forgot with it’s mom and pop shops giving military and veterans discounts and some reserved parking) is the only place in the area where electricity is from a municipal utility instead of a private company, unlike water which is a patchwork of governmental and private suppliers, a couple of towns have different neighborhoods be municipal or private, but now they’re increasingly calls for cities, countries, and even the State to municipalize/nationalize (provincialize? What do you call it when a U.S. State does it?) P, G & E.
As a customer I’ve had good service from P, G & E myself, in a couple ways they’re better than the water provider the East Bay Municipal Utility District (previously the East Bay Water Company when it was privately owned), as they’re easier to get a person on the phone and (until it crashed this week) they had a website where you could view your upcoming bill on-line. In terms of price per year for service and how fast they do repairs I don’t see much difference between my governmental water supplier and my “investor owned” electricity and gas supplier, I’ve been happy with both so I suspect that I probably won’t notice much difference.
At this point if the State doesn’t I expect municipalities other than Alameda to take over being a power supplier, some will do well, others I expect to do poorly (hello East Palo Alto where cop cars are driven with a broken headlight!), and with how regulated utilities are (’cause of the deaths) it kinda makes sense to just pay for public employees to do the jobs instead of inspecting them, but knowing the State of California they’d wind up hiring private contractors to do most of the work anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if the State required the private companies supplying power in southern California to take over P, G, & E’s areas.
I know that in the City of Berkeley (where my Mom lives) gaslines in new housing is forbidden and solar panels are required (but what if that building is always in the shade of another, what’s the point?), maybe those policies will spread.
A lot of this is because California. Is too dry too often with all of the folks now here, I really don’t know how it will or even should play out.
The usual word for that is “dry season.” It happens that where you and I live the dry season includes (but is not limited to) the summer, but in much of the world, including, I think, most of the U.S., summer rain is not uncommon.
We were talking for all this time about how to adjust birth rates using tax incentives, benefits and ma/paternity leave.
But Cali knows that all it takes to make more babies is to turn the electricity off for a while.
Not a resident of California…but I recall troubles with the California electric grid made natoinal news sometime between 1999 and 2001. The troubles generating blackouts and rolling brownouts, which affected hundreds of thousands to millions of customers.
Perusing a Wiki article that comes from some searching, I notice that the name Enron gets mentioned, as well as discussion of partial-de-regulation. Apparently, the cost of electricity to consumers was still regulated and kept artificially low, while the cost of electricity for the Utility was un-regulated…and there was a requirement for the Utility to buy from the independent producers at a price set that day by producers.
I can’t tell whether those outages were larger than the current PG&E outage, but it is worth noticing that those outages ought to still be within living memory.
@S_J,
I chiefly remember the “rolling blackouts’ of 2001 for being one of the causes of Governor Gray Davis being re-called and replaced with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I didn’t personally know anyone who actually had their power shutoff, as that was mostly in southern California and back then folks were glad to be in the PG&E service area.
So far though this time I only personally know one guy (who lives in Fairfield) who’s had their electricity shutdown.
They really should have been called rolling grayouts.
@EchoChaos,
It looks like the effort to municipalize power distribution is getting stronger now, PG&E just rejected a bid as too lowball by The City and County of San Francisco to buy the grid there.
The NY Times has two new pieces on this mess as well:
‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room
(The San Diego ‘investor owned utility’ does these conditions better)
In a high-tech state, blackouts are a low-tech way to prevent fires
( ‘Tech’ solutions)
and
The Haves and Have-Nots of (Electrical) Power in California
(A rural northern Californian?
Sucks to be you)
To what extent is traditional fantasy — the stuff with dragons, goblins, elves, and such — thought of as kid stuff right now?
My impression is that a couple of generations ago, in the 60s, most of this stuff was firmly in the for-kids camp. If it was 1965 and you were reading about dragons, you were probably reading a fairy tale to your kid. There was some fantasy stuff over in gothic horror (ghosts, spirits, demons), and that was in the adult realm, but most of it was not.
But things do change. The Lord of the Rings became part of mainstream culture, with a bunch of big-budget movies to boot. And later The Game of Thrones planted the flag even more firmly in adult territory, with episode after episode of blood and tits and magic. And of course over in video games World of Warcraft became a huge phenomenon, full of traditional fantasy motifs, and was enjoyed by players of all ages.
Going the other way, the Harry Potter series is definitely fantasy, with wizards and dragons and elves and all the rest. But it was aimed at adolescents, so it may have pulled fantasy’s center of gravity a few steps kidward.
So where does that leave fantasy? Is it truly an all-ages genre at this point? Or is it still mostly over in kid-land, despite occasional forays into the adult world?
Guys my dad’s age:
Shut off Game of Thrones as soon as the dragon shit started, slept through the one attempt to show him Fellowship of the Ring. Just totally doesn’t move the needle at all. Will always code comic books, video games, fantasy stuff as juvenile
Around our age:
Split, residual guilt. Still thought of instinctually as a very light vice, something you’d be better off weaning yourself off of. Weighing the pleasure of another 100000 words from George RR Martin vs. possibly going to your grave without reading the dusty Doystoyevsky or Kafka you bought a year ago
Zoomers:
A few judging you for wasting any time reading something nonallegorical in a world where you could read things with messages about important things. Mostly just accepting and don’t “get” that there’s supposed to be a distinction between literary and genre fiction as a concept, or that you’d ever “grow out” of reading young adult fiction. Totally don’t understand why you wouldn’t take The Joker as seriously as anything else, if its being made as a serious movie
A little nitpick: I’m not sure “Around our age” is a very useful designation.
I don’t know your age, hence can only guess your dad’s. I am seventy-four, and have been reading fantasy since I was a child—I had to wait for the second volume of The Lord of the Rings to be published before I could read it. I do not believe there has been any point during my adult life when fantasy, most notably LOTR, was viewed as kid stuff by the people around me.
Different bubbles for different folk.
My father is seventy-five, so your peer. He regards fantasy as a teenager thing that he did when he was a teen, but now he focuses his reading on more important stuff.
He doesn’t look down on me for still reading it as an adult, it’s just his personal choice. He’s bought me several fantasy books as birthday presents.
He wouldn’t watch Game of Thrones, but that’s for religious reasons (same as me, I watched a few episodes, realized it wasn’t for me and turned it off).
He enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies, never watched the Hobbit.
I am thirty-seven, my sons love fantasy books and read and discuss them with me.
Ok, I’ll bite: what’s the difference between genre and literary fiction?
In the case of bad genre fiction, sometimes it panders enough to my various idiosyncratic interests for me to enjoy it anyway. Bad literary fiction is always intolerable.
Despite some protestations otherwise, literary fiction is a genre. It just happens to be the genre that people employed as English professors tend to like compared to most people.
Some rough estimate of birth years would be interesting.
Another anecdotal point: I was shocked when another friend indicated disapproval that his adult daughter was still seriously into D&D. So, it is sufficiently mainstream that I had assumed it was universally accepted, but not sufficiently mainstream for me to be right.
For reference, the ages in question are mid-20s and mid-40s.
My impression is that D&D, like Magic or WoW, is something a kids/mortgage/job adult can do, but they’re definitely putting on the nerd robe and wizard hat by doing so. Some video games seem to be more accepted, perhaps because they’re more popular.
I guess I’m so far into nerd country that people ’round here don’t need to put on special robes or hats for D&D, we are already wearing them.
The mid 1960s are also when you get “Puff, The Magic Dragon”
But was this just an aberration? I was under the impression most of those folk tales were originally for everyone. Tolkein in 1939 suggests that “the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history”, but we might suspect bias in his case. Any literary scholars here?
I would like to blame Disney, but 1939 is probably too early for that to be the original cause.
There is of course also the 1952 C.S. Lewis essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children from which the famous line “when I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up”. But it’s worth linking to in full– and discusses Tolkien’s essay.
The essay discusses the possibility of fantastic writing for adults- mentioning not only the Odyssey and the Tempest, but also The Worm Ouroboros (published in 1922, and incidentally highly recommended to anyone here who hasn’t read it)
I was told that Puff the Magic dragon was about Hanalei bay in Kauai on my Hawaii honeymoon but was misinterpreted.
I’ve mentioned before, I don’t read (or watch much) fantasy stuff but with that (dis?)qualification, here’s my anecdote:
As a young 20-something I was surprised to discover several of my peers reading Harry Potter. In my mind it was solidly for kids, and at first I thought maybe they were reading it ironically or out of a last-ditch sentimental grab for their vanishing childhood. But then it didn’t stop: I continued to hear about my peers reading Harry Potter even now in my mid-30s. So while for me personally it’s filed under “kid stuff”, I intellectually understand that it can be enjoyed by intelligent adults.
Why am I still in the habit of filing fantasy under “kid stuff”? I think it mostly comes down to what I mentioned last time, about how the genre seems to be stuck on repeat with all the elves and wizards and dragons, and not much “fantastical” or outside of what would be recognizably medieval and European. This tendency to stick closely to well-established themes and tropes and archetypes and imagery reads to me as a way to keep things simple and easy to understand, for an audience that isn’t capable of doing a lot of mental gymnastics to wrap their heads around radically new or strange concepts. It’s a lot easier for me to explain something to a child in terms the child is already familiar with than to introduce something very off-the-wall. (Which is counter-intuitive given kids are supposed to have more neuroplasticity or whatever it’s called.) Add to this that once you normalize fantasy (figure out what each fantastical element represents and map that to basic concepts like good and evil) the stories and messages on top are often rather trite or banal. Can you really explore, for example, issues related to human mortality, in a world where problems can literally be solved by the wave of a magic wand?
No doubt some fantasy still manages to do this, but the effort required to find it surpasses my will, when I know there is plenty of other stuff where it exists and where I don’t need to spend energy suppressing my harrumphs about wizards and elves and dragons.
How much recent fantasy have you actually read? This comes across as incredibly ignorant of the current state of the genre. The biggest fantasy series of the last few years is N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth series, which this doesn’t describe remotely.
Did you read the first sentence in my post, which was a caveat to the rest of it? Or how about the last sentence, in which I admit that I might be wrong but have rational reasons not to explore further?
I wrote those specifically because I knew somebody would say “But have you read [this one book or series that few who aren’t into fantasy have heard about]?”
ETA: And by the way, the fact that Broken earth is the biggest fantasy series of the last few years but I still haven’t heard about it — probably because they haven’t made a movie or TV show about it — tells you something important: the fantasy that is easiest to market and introduce to general audiences is steeped heavily in the stuff I mentioned. Meaning, when Joe Sixpack hears about a fantasy movie, he expects wizards and dragons and elves, and if you make him actually try to comprehend an author’s unique visions or, uh, fantasies, he’ll scratch his head and elect to watch something else instead. I interpret this as the genre having painted itself into a corner. Maybe not the fault of the authors themselves, but due to the ridiculous level of success by Tolkien and Rowling who then set everyone else’s expectations?
Eh, saying “I’m ignorant of the state of X, but it’s totally stuck in Y” is just begging for the counter “Actually, the central example is currently Z”.
And although I don’t much like her writing, Jemison is clearly a central example of modern fantasy.
And I agree with him (although the tone is rough), your view is fairly out of date. The biggest fantasy series recently are things like Wheel of Time (no elves, very different wizards, no dragons and plenty of non-European elements), Sanderson’s Cosmere (no elves, VERY different wizards, no dragons, lots of non-medieval and non-European elements), Bas-Lag (no elves, no wizards, European, but very non-medieval).
If you’re not interested in the genre, that’s fair.
That’s interesting. Judging by the OP and past discussions, it seems not just my but most people’s view of fantasy is out of date! So why is that? Why has non-elf/wizard/dragon fantasy failed, among non-fantasy-connoisseurs, to make a lasting impression that updates the image of the genre it belongs to? Why in 2019 are we still looking at British-accented dwarfs and enchanted castles if a fantasy movie comes on?
After all, we no longer think of sci-fi as Golden-Age-of-Sci-Fi stuff about heroic explorers bedding purple alien chicks and zapping evil green guys with ray guns; that genre now encompasses everything from space operas (Interstellar, Ad Astra) to stories about AI (Ex Machina, Her, Westworld) to stuff about genetic engineering (Gattaca) and time travel (Looper, Primer). So how did fantasy paint itself (or at least its popular image) into a corner?
@Well…
I suspect it has to do with the fact that most people just don’t read at all.
Sci-fi’s change in perception was driven more by TV shows than by books, which grew out of the “Golden Age” very rapidly.
So? If people don’t read that should affect sci-fi as well. Hasn’t fantasy had its share of TV shows? Xena and Hercules were big when I was a kid, and now we have GoT. Plus the big LotR and HP movies. Why isn’t the outside-the-box stuff growing out of this very rapidly?
@Well…
You have five examples, of which only two are the standard “elves, wizards and medieval Europe”, assuming that you count HP as that, which I do.
So it’s probably your view skewed by Tolkien and Rowling, yes.
GoT is clearly an example as well, so that’s 3/5. A majority. A super-majority, even!
@Well…
GoT is interesting because it isn’t really that. It’s very low magic, there are no wizards. It does have dragons and medieval Europe, but no elves or other fantasy races.
I specifically excluded it as not meeting those basic criteria because of that.
I think you’re stretching your original claim a bit to put GoT in with them.
Huh? I only watched a couple seasons but I remember a scene where there’s some kind of seer or sorcerer and he’s pacing around a magic fire and he’s able to predict something about the future or making something happen far away…plus that kid who falls out of the tower has mystical visions, and aren’t the white walkers a kind of enchanted people? And OK there’s no elves, but there are dire wolves, and isn’t there also someone who can shape-shift or something?
That’s not the Golden Age you’re describing, it’s the Pulp Era. The Golden Age is specifically called that because that’s when science fiction stopped being about heroic explorers bedding purple alien chicks and zapping evil green guys with ray guns and instead became about scientific realism and the sensawunda (at least until the New Wave came along).
Oh, OK. Pulp Era then.
minor nitpick: GoT does have elves, its just that they died a long time ago. The Children of the Forest pretty much exactly fit the standard elves trope.
But I agree that GoT subverts enough other tropes so as not to be considered standard fantasy fiction.
Tolkien was the major influence in bringing fantasy back into English literature. There is one dragon in The Hobbit, which was written primarily for children. There are zero dragons in the three books of LOTR, written for adults. Also zero magic wands, and very little magic at all in the sense in which it shows up in the generic extruded fantasy product you are thinking of.
Not really true.
I mean, technically a wand isn’t a staff and vice-versa, but practically speaking …
So, fantasy was part of English literature, then died out, then Tolkien brought it back? And in doing so he set the (rather strict) tone for all the fantasy we’re now familiar with?
I don’t think there is a “rather strict tone” for modern fantasy. I think there is a lot of not very good fantasy which is highly derivative of Tolkien—what I describe as extruded fantasy product.
There is some much better fantasy that is less obviously derivative of Tolkien. I think it was the third of Cherryh’s Morgiane books where I realized that the not-quite-human species interacted with was inspired by Tolkien elves–because that was the first book in the series where they were the good guys, and we are used to thinking of elves as good guys, although it’s clear in Tolkien that that is an unjustified assumption.
Then there is quite a lot of fantasy, with Bujold as one good example, that has nothing to do with Tolkien and some of which is very good.
@Well…
It’s not really true that fantasy had “died out” before Tolkien. For example, some of the more well thought of authors in the decades before Tolkien include J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan); L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz); Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian); William Morris (The Well at World’s End); George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin, Phantasies, etc.); Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, John Carter of Mars); T. H. White (The Once and Future King); Lord Dunsany (The King of Elf-Land’s Daughter, The Gods of Pegana, etc.); Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast); E. R. Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros, Zimiamvian trilogy); and so on. Tolkien just became so massively popular that he has tended to overshadow what came before him, even though he was perfectly willing to admit his debt to them.
In several of your cases, authors from the century before Tolkein.
And with the exception of White and Peake, all of your examples date to at least thirty years before the first paperback(*) printing of Lord of the Rings. When people say fantasy had “died out”, it’s mostly that thirty years they are talking about, and what you can find to try and pull in the edges of that gap still leaves a pretty dead-looking gap to my eyes.
And if you exclude the sword-and-sorcery stuff, it’s more of a fifty-year gap – which gives you the narrative of fantasy being considered serious literature until roughly WWI, then mostly childish pulp that “serious” adults are embarrassed to read, then the pulp audience drifting in new directions until they’ve been gone for a generation and it’s safe to read “serious” fantasy again.
If the standard is merely “someone published a work in that genre sometime in the last decade, and the fans of the genre say it’s great, so it’s definitely not dead, so there!”, then meh, basically no genre ever “dies” but there’s still a pretty clear distinction being made.
* If you’re putting Once and Future King and Gormenghast in the “decades before Tolkein”, then you’re definitely not counting from the original hardcover LOTR.
@mitv150
GoT has most of the elements of a standard high-fantasy setting: dragons, wizards (red priests, wargs), prophecies, magic races (children of the forest, giants, white walkers), the tv show even has the Night King as a Sauron stand-in.
However, what makes GoT unique is that in the books and the first 3-4 seasons it uses these elements sparingly, mostly as background. While in a classic fantasy the fantastic elements are treated as common knowledge by the main characters and drive the plot, in GoT most characters are unaware or don’t care. So instead of the classical plot with a party of brave heroes who must journey to strange hostile lands to fetch the MacGuffin and defeat the Dark Lord, we get fedual houses engaging in a dynastic squabble.
George Martin used the generic fantasy setting as an excuse to write a Medieval political drama, breathing new life into a largely stale genre, creating a work that appealed to adultaudiences, not just because of the tiddies’n stabbings, but the more complex and mature plot.
However, the fantasy elements eventually prevented the story from having a good resolution. The last two books, as far as I know (I didn’t read them, but I know the general content) were mostly filler. Then Martin went on to write prequels and side stories instead of ending the series. And the tv show writers did what they did. Not to excuse their incompetence (certain choices were unnecessarily bad), but they were indeed passed a poisoned chalice: once “ice” and “fire” start moving on the board all the political machinations of Cersei, Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger, Oleanna, etc. become irrelevant, forcing the plot into a generic fantasy format, albeit one with a long and narratively unnecessary preable, which violates the principle of narrative economy. I don’t think it could be really salvaged in a satisfactory way.
littskad’s list does not include James Branch Cabell who, whatever else one may think of his rather odd books, was certainly writing for adults.
You might try some Michael Swanwick. His “Dragons” trilogy, “The Iron Dragon’s Daughter,” “Dragons of Babel,” “The Iron Dragon’s Mother” takes all the fantasy tropes and stirs in a satirical, cynical, compassionate mix of modern concerns (and technology) without pounding you over the head with them. The takeoff point is the old tales about elves or goblins stealing or switching babies. “Iron dragons” are sentient fighter-bombers flown by half-breeds of elf and human. It is not kid stuff.
Swanwick is one of those “should be better known” sf and fantasy authors.
Also recommended: Joe Abercrombie’s “First Law” trilogy, a deeply cynical take on a lot of traditional hero’s journey tropes. No other races precisely, except sort of magical vampire superhero things, but a fair bit of magic and epic fantasy stuff, except you only ever catch glimpses of the grand sweep of Silmarillion-style history from the perspective of bit players who don’t really understand what’s going on.
It gets surprisingly sentimental and maudlin, especially in the stand-alone novels, in ways that I think are mostly earned.
I realize that I’m arguing against gut feelings that are not necesarily supposed to be rational here, but I think this is selling the genre short by a lot. I mean, yes, there is dumb and shitty fantasy, but there is dumb and shitty everything and the fantasy genre has long since grown beyond “here is some good guys, here is some bad guys, they fight.”.
I guess at this point it’s less that I’m expressing irrational gut feelings and more that I’m pointing to fantasy’s failure (relative to sci-fi) to present sophisticated, original themes to mass audiences, and I’m asking “why?” in a half-curious, half-condemning way.
Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter dominating 2000s movies, pretty much.
Everybody tried to get in on that, so that is what you ended up with.
Even then, you had exceptions like City of Ember, Constantine, Blade and all the wuxia films, all of which are fantasy that doesn’t fit your genre list.
That’s probably partly what EchoChaos mentioned about Sci-Fi making the jump to tv earlier than fantasy (and LotR and Harry Potter being the first two that got there) and partly because any genre will come up short in interesting and sophisticated original themes when compared to Sci-Fi.
For Sci-Fi, presenting interesting and sophisticated ideas is one of it’s main selling points, whereas other genres sort of have it as an added bonus.
Do you view political thrillers, whodunnits, romance stories, westerns or other genres as having similar failures?
Interesting and sophisticated — or at least “odd and unique” — ideas is right there in the name “fantasy”, or at least it is when I think of that word. Maybe my expectations were set wrong by the name of the genre. Maybe if it was called “Medieval European magical wizard-elf-dragon drama” I wouldn’t have this issue with it. Westerns demonstrate this, because they don’t usually aspire — even in the name of their genre — to be much more than revenge stories set in the old west. Whatever sophisticated interesting ideas they present are an added bonus, as you said.
So yeah maybe it comes down to the name of the genre. Political thrillers, whodunnits, romances…these are narrowly desriptive enough that I don’t have high expectations in terms of sophistication or variety.
As an anecdote, many people I know are into fantasy, both much younger and much older than me, and that includes my own parents. And dismissing fantasy as “something for kids” is uncommon enough that this question surprised me a lot; while I’m aware that such views exist, I have never thought of this dismissal as of a trend rather than some sort of quirk of separate individuals.
However, my social circle is really nerdy, so I assume my situation differs significantly from the general population.
The trend seems to be that fiction genres once considered kid stuff become mainstream adult, or all-ages, entertainment.
Comic book superheroes are a perfect example: once considered firmly a kid genre (e.g. Adam West’s Batman) they morphed to something suitable for teens but also palatable to adults, with occasional forays deep into adult territory.
This seems clearly related to the 80s-90s nostalgia overload effect. I don’t know who drives it. Is it the millennials forever stuck in their childhood, clinging to the vestiges of a happier life, before, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis crushed their dreams, when people didn’t use to carry a Skinner box outrage machine in their pocket all the time everywhere? Or is it the unimaginative giant media corporations, that churn out bland assembly-line entertainment designed to appeal the lowest common denominator?
Even without large corporations, written fantasy seems also quite unimaginative nowadays.
???
Curse of Chalion? Spinning Silver? Cherryh’s Fortress series? Pratchett?
With thousands books being published every year you can always find an example of anything, but I don’t think these are central examples of mainstream modern fantasy.
The only one of this list that I’ve heard before is Pratchett, and even with Pratchett I don’t see his books when I casually browse the fantasy bookshelves of my local bookstores, which mostly have Tolkien, Rowling, Martin, Sapkowski and a hundred modern imitations.
@viVI_IViv
The only authors you appear to be familiar with are ones whose work has been picked up by Hollywood for Television/Movie adaptation or used as the basis for video games. That’s fine if you want to talk about how a non-reading audience interacts with a genre, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about written fantasy, which was your original claim David Friedman was responding to.
To try and put this in terms of another medium, this is what this exchange looks like from the outside.
Video Games:
“Video Games these days seem to be nothing but mass-produced monetized skinner boxes with the bare minimum of narrative and gameplay slapped over them to make people subscribe”
“What about The Last Of Us? The Witcher 3? Bioshock: Infinite? Sid Meier?”
“I don’t think these are central examples of mainstream modern video games, I’ve only ever heard of Sid Meier and I never see anyone talk about his games.”
Films:
“Modern film-makers are all shakey-cam and CGI. No one’s making movies with real directorial intent anymore.”
“What about Baby Driver? Blade Runner 2049? Joker? Christopher Nolan?”
“I don’t think these are central examples of modern films or directors. I’ve only ever heard of Nolan and I never see his movies at the store.”
Interesting Article I found that is adjacent to rational thinking and in particular re. Point #4 people getting fired for “incorrect thought” when tweeting. A lot of good stuff in here, particularly if you have an interest in stocks and investing.
First one is very good and correct.
The second one is interesting but i am not sure about it’s application. I mean, usually there are constraints… might apply more to bussiness than politics.
As a corollary to third, i would like to quote something: “How did you went bankrupt? Slowly then suddenly”. Collapse often goes that way, both WW I and WW II ended that way, to keep with the examples.
As a corollary to the fourth i would recommend reading Machiavelli on the reasons why it is better to be feared than loved. It’s similar thing, because it touches the fact that losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.
(also, talk about overselling importance of the airplane…)
I’m curious, though, how do you connect that to cancel culture?
For the fifth, i would like to introduce geographic voting patterns which persist for *centuries*. Very much agree on that.
For a short, clickbaity article, very good 😉
FWIW I briefly went to the the Berkeley SSC meetupearlier this evening, I couldn’t stay long as I had to bring dinner home to my wife and older son and take over babysitting of our younger son, but I spoke to a few people in the 30 minutes I was there.
I left too soon to meet our host, but the crowd was a few 60+ grey haired men, but mostly it seemed to be 20 and 30 something young men and women, a few seemed nervous, but most were smiling and affable, and I caught a couple of conversations about how Berkeley was different than other places, there was some carrots, crackers, celery, and dip out to share.
The house itself was decorated with astronomical pictures and many books, it was obviously a remarkably clean group home in a remodeled pre-war “four square” house not far from my old high school, city hall, and the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library.
Wish they started earlier, but I’d recommend it for those who want to stay out later.
If you come to our meetup you can bring your wife and both sons, and we provide dinner. So you won’t have to leave early.
On the other hand, San Jose is farther from you than Berkeley.
@DavidFriedman,
Thanks that’s very kind, I don’t think the three-year old is ready for that long of a trip but I appreciate the thought.
Odds are pretty good that the three-year old would not be the youngest person attending. My granddaughter was at the last, and she’s seven months. For older little children, there is a swing set and slide in the back yard.
I’ve been reading previous open thread, found something interesting and wanted to reply but then i noticed it was few days ago.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/06/open-thread-138/#comment-807641
It’s John Schilling question/request about arguments against Fermi paradox and it inspired me to think about something:
I can:
Growth is a feature of evolved organism, as understood in the Fermi paradox though (ie: space is necessarily colonized by expansionist organism. Even if a civilization stops expanding, it simply means another one would colonize the space instead, one that didn’t stop expanding)
My argument is that expansionism is evolutionary fitness for organisms by the virtue of all it’s biological functionality (reproduction calls for more than replacement due to the previous paragraph argument and because otherwise random losses will wipe it out)
It is however, not a feature of intellect.
Still, we only need one civilization being expansionist to have Fermi paradox.
However, further argument is that from intellectual perspective, especially economic one, given our current understanding of physics and especially general relativity, stellar expansionism does not make any sense at all.
There is no return on investment due to costs and lightspeed lag. And economic reasons are a subset of evolutionary laws – a species which does not follow self interest in economic sense is a species which did not evolve self-interest in evolutionary/biological sense. And it is a species that died out long before achieving technological civilization.
The conclusion is that there is no Fermi paradox.
(uh, yeah, i could flesh the argument out a bit. For example, there is no colonization in space in the sense of getting rid of excess population. It is just a vanity project, and extremely expensive at that, and unlikely to be done in a situation where there is a overpopulation and necessary lack of resources. Since, as i mentioned, there is no ROI)
Hm, let me make another summary: evolution requires successful species to be egoistic (for self-interested survival) and to reproduce (which is altruistic behaviour, but is required to survive as a species). It achieves it through not giving the species choice at avoiding reproducing. However, civilization requires intellect and gives the species ability to avoid reproducing in pursuit of it’s prime egoistical motivator. Therefore extinction is inevitability, not exponential growth.
(Tt means the universe is *littered* with ruins of alien civilizations. Though we will never discover them because we will end that way too)
Sure, alien races wouldn’t necessarily need to colonize, since as you say expansion is not necessarily a feature of intellect, but curiosity is a feature of intellect. How do you explain the lack of Van Neumann Probes?
Quality control.
I mean, it’s a major question whether we can make a single AI here on Earth that will share our values. Von Neumann Probes involved seeding the entire galaxy with intelligent replicating grey goo and hoping it never eats us.
Are going to postulate a means of satisfying curiosity about the physical world outside of our solar system that involve actually going out of the solar system, and call it a VN probe? (because the self-replicating goo is just a horror scenario for no gain and falls under my previous argument)
For the curiosity, which i think is good counterargument, i am not sure. Yes, we probably should send some automatic (AI?) probes outside solar system (well, we already send non-AI probes…). There are some unknowns here, though:
– what is the saturation? While galaxy colonizing civilization does not depend on the density of such civilizations in the galaxy, such probes do. It might be the case that such civilizations are rare and short lived enough that there is none close enough to Earth that would send anything automated here.
– what is the noticeability. It might be the case that there are such probes in the solar system, it’s just that they are not noticeable for us. I base it on the assumption that they need not to be overly large and energy-intensive for their purposes. It might be the case that there are already such probes in Solar System that are escaping our relatively limited detection methods.
The conclusion is that i don’t think it’s a given that exploratory probes would be necessarily noticed, and that grey-goo VN probes fall under my original argument (precisely that there is no reason to make them)
This one always comes up, so I think it’s time to put paid to it once and for all.
Let’s examine the reasoning behind Von Neumann Probes vis a vis the Fermi paradox. At it’s most basic, the argument goes like this:
1. If we observe the existence of Von Neumann Probes, then at least one advanced alien civilization exists,
2. We don’t observe the existence of Von Neumann Probes,
3. Therefore, no advanced alien civilizations exist.
The premises are undeniable. If we observed evidence of advanced civilizations, such as Von Neumann probes, it would be clear evidence for the existence of same (tautologically). We don’t know how to construct Von Neumann probes, therefore any probes observed would have to have been made by someone else. We also haven’t observed anything like a Von Neumann Probe. The premises are, as best we can tell, true.
Of course, anyone with even the most basic knowledge of logic will spot that the argument is formally invalid – it is denying the antecedent.
If you try to reverse the first premise into:
1. If no advanced civilizations exist, we would not observe Von Neumann Probes,
2. We do not observe Von Neumann Probes,
3. Therefore, no advanced civilizations exists.
You’re affirming the consequent, which is equally fallacious.
If, on the other hand, you’re going to try:
1. If at least one advanced civilization exists, we would observe Von Neumann Probes,
I am going to dispute the hell out of that premise, which should be constructed as:
1. IF Von Neumann Probes are possible AND advanced civilizations exist AND there are no other reasons why Von Neumann Probes would not work as expected, THEN we would observe Von Neumann Probes.
The first two are known unknowns: we do not know whether Von Neumann Probes can be constructed until we either observe or make one, nor do we know whether advanced civilizations exist. The third is in the category of unknown unknowns – we won’t know whether Von Neumann Probes can behave as postulated until we either see them in action, or make and use some ourselves (which is pretty much a subset of the former).
Given that everything about the final form of the premise is unknown, we have no way of assigning a truth value to it and any argument incorporating it must fail.
ETA:
Elaboration on last point, because it may not be clear: a
valid(nope, it would still be fallacious, because it is possible that no alien civilization would choose to make Von Neumann Probes, even if possible) argument wrt the Fermi Paradox and involving Von Neumann Probes would look like this:1. IF Von Neumann Probes are possible AND advanced civilizations exist AND there are no other reasons why Von Neumann Probes would not work as expected, THEN we would observe Von Neumann Probes.
2. Von Neumann Probes are possible,
3. Von Neumann Probes work as expected,
4. We do not observe alien-made Von Neumann Probes,
5. Therefore, no advanced alien civilization exists.
Note: the reason for “alien-made” in the 4th premise should be obvious – the only way that premises 2, 3 and 4 can be true is if we’re making and operating Von Neumann Probes ourselves.
The first half of your comment is just knocking down 2 arguments no one ever made in my opinion, but you can change my mind, if you can provide evidence. I will talk about the second half.
There are great differences between different unknowns: I don’t know that I will eat eggs tomorrow and I also don’t know whether I will be selected as the ambassador of humanity by an alien race tomorrow, but still my not knowing is very different in the two cases.
Similarly, everybody agrees on things like we are not 100% sure that Von Neumann Probes are possible, but that does not mean that we can’t claim that it is highly likely von Neumann probes are possible even though we haven’t been able to make them yet. And then we can make probabilistic arguments with that statement by combining it with other arguments to claim that other things are also highly likely. Introducing: Inductive reasoning.
So, with your arguments of “we can’t know with 100% certainty that X is true until [event that hasn’t happened yet and would make X close to 100% certain]” you did successfully destroyed the position that “It is 100% certain that there are no advanced alien civilizations.”, but no one believed that position anyway.
Also, It is a bit surprising that I have to make this argument in a rationalist space, because one of the core tenets of the movement is Bayesian reasoning, specificially that the trueness of every statement is a number between 0 and 1 and one of the views of Yudkowsky is that statements concerning the real world can’t be true with a probability of 0 and 1, because that would require infinite evidence as 0 and 1 are -inf and inf in log-odds and the difference in log-odds measures the amount of evidence needed to go from one level of certainty to the other (this comes from Bayes-rule for odds).
Probabilistic reasoning isn’t an actual substitute for logic, you do realize that?
The question was:
To which the answer is: why would you expect the absence of Von Neumann Probes to tell you anything interesting about the Fermi Paradox?
I have outlined the possible arguments that could be used to reason about the Fermi Paradox using the observed absence of Von Neumann Probes as a premise (data point). Two of them are fallacious, one undetermined because it invokes more than one unknown. Any further arguments will have the form of extending the third argument, thus being just as undetermined. This allows me to formulate Faza’s VNP Syllogism:
No, Bayesian probability doesn’t help you one bit here.
You can also claim that there’s an invisible, undetectable unicorn sitting on my head, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to take your claims in any way seriously.
With regards to Von Neumann Probes, my priors are against them being possible and/or practical. Based on these, I would not expect to find Von Neumann Probes. I am not finding Von Neumann Probes. The predictive power of my model is strong.
Your priors are that Von Neumann Probes are possible and likely. We would therefore expect to be finding them all over the place.* We are not seeing any Von Neumann Probes. The predictive power of your model is weak.
You’re doing induction wrong – rather than reasoning from specific to general, you’re reasoning from imagined to imagined.
A proper – which doesn’t mean sensible – induction would observe that we’ve not seen any instances of sustained exponential growth to the point of exhausting available space in any of the species that currently occupy, or have in the past occupied, the Earth, nor does humanity do so, despite being freed from the usual constraints (the most prosperous countries tend to have declining population growth); therefore, we should not expect to observe this out in space.
Or, more lightheartedly (though we’re really abusing induction here): since the only advanced civilization we know of (ours) isn’t particularly interested in making Von Neumann Probes (or even space travel in general), we can expect other civilizations to also not want to do this.
Again, this model gives better predictions than assuming Von Neumann Probes are totally a thing.
* This isn’t strictly true, for reasons that should be obvious by now (additional supressed premises), but we don’t need to worry about it here.
Yes, I realize that. I also realize that insults are not very effective if you don’t explain how they could possibly apply to whom you are insulting.
And this is where you are wrong. So I’ve already written a comment why, but I will write it down again: You can’t just say something is unknown (or undetermined in your words) and thus every argument using it is fallacious, because every single thing (or most things, if you don’t believe Yudkowsky) in the real world is unknown. However, things are unknown in different degrees and if a statement is only a little bit “not known” you can make other causally connected statements lose their unknown-ness too.
Yes, this is true: I did not supply you with arguments for the viability of von Neumann probes, because that wasn’t the point of my comment. The point of my comment was to show you that your “metaargument from unknown-ness” is nonsense, ie ” the only way that premises 2, 3 and 4 can be true is if we’re making and operating Von Neumann Probes ourselves.” is not coherent, just as your first statement in Faza’s VNP Syllogism is false.
To simplify for you some more. This is a valid reasoning:
1. A -> B (ie From A, B follows)
2. A is not known with 100% certainty, but is highly likely.
3. From 1 and 2, it follows that B is highly likely.
(In our case, A is your statements 1,2,3,4 taken together(ie when all of them are true) and B is statement 5, ie that no alien civilization exists)
And you said that: we don’t know A with 100% percent certainty, so it does not matter that we know that A->B is true, we can’t say anything at all about B!
‘Twas no more an insult than your surprise at “hav[ing] to make this argument in a rationalist space”. I was just making sure we’re on the same page.
I didn’t say that. I said “fallacious OR undetermined”. We might even say “fallacious XOR undetermined”, because a known fallacious argument is necessarily determined (i.e. we know that it’s fallacious).
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The problem with the third – not fallacious, please note – form of the argument is that we have n unkowns, most of which are unknown unknowns, that is: we do not even now n, let alone how to assign probabilities.
Mind you, we don’t really know how to assign probabilities to the known unknowns either. We know exactly one spacefaring (though not starfaring, unless you count the Voyagers) civilization exists – ours. We know we don’t know whether there’s some special sauce that made it possible for us to evolve, but is unique to just the Earth – which is why the Fermi Paradox is a paradox.
We most certainly don’t know how to assign probabilities to the possibility of Von Neumann Probes and to their expected behaviour (more on that in a second). We know we don’t know how to build one at present, and I personally am sceptical it is possible at all, in any meaningful sense. We know of one physical phenomenon that fits the bill – life – but that doesn’t suit us particularly well. Life has a tendency to evolve over long timescales, for one, so we’re faced with the possibility that our probes quickly cease performing any useful function, other than self-sustaining and reproducing, given the timescales we’re talking about.
Then there’s the fact that we don’t really have any idea of what travel over interstellar distances involves, because we’ve never done it. The VNP hypothesis assumes implicitly that the probes will be able to cross interstellar distances functionally unscathed and able to perform their primary functions when they arrive at their destinations. Given the problems we have sending probes to solar system bodies, despite having done it for decades and knowing what to expect, I believe this to be a wildly optimistic assumption. Your mileage may vary, and your guess is as good as mine – which is the entire point. Incidentally, we can only determine if we were successful when the probe reaches its destination and reports back. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what timescales that involves. This naturally puts a bit of a damper on iterative design and you pretty much have to get it right the first time.
EDIT: My bad. I did miss “know” in the original post, which added to the confusion. I could try to hide behind the fact that in the context of an argument a premise is true iff we know it to be true, but I really should have said it outright. Otherwise, the following still stands.
It seems my mistake was in assuming that we’re evaluating the VNP hypothesis based on the same claims made about VNP – which would seem natural, given that we’re discussing them in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Permit me to quote the wiki:
These two claims form the basis for premise 3: Von Neumann Probes work as expected (the expectation being that they would be all over the place by now).
We haven’t observed any Von Neumann Probes. This means one of three things:
1. Nobody’s sending Von Neumann Probes, or
2. Von Neumann Probes don’t work as expected (that is: do not multiply at the rates proposed by Tipler or Sagan/Newman), or
3. Von Neumann Probes are not possible.
In this context, it should be clear that if any alien civilization were to deploy Von Neumann Probes, we would observe them. We do not. If we have not observed Von Neumann Probes coming from a different civilization, the only way we can know that Von Neumann Probes are possible and that they work as expected is if we have made, deployed and observed them ourselves.
I hope we’re now clear on this.
This is certainly valid for a probabilistic value of valid, but it is not necessarily sound. The point in dispute is premise 2. It cannot be assumed to be true, but must be demonstrated.
In terms of pure induction, I rate the existence of extraterrestrial spacefaring civilizations as much more probable (we exist, so we know that such a civilization is at least possible) than Von Neumann Probes that do not exist and hence we know nothing about what an actual Von Neumann Probe is like (no, theoretical models are no substitute; models are only as good as how they compare to reality and you need a reality to make the comparison).
But we’re not talking about B, we’re talking about C. Or D even.
The only certainty we’re dealing with here is that we have not observed any Von Neumann Probes. There could be any number of possible reasons for this, such as:
1. Von Neumann Probes aren’t possible,
2. Even if Von Neumann Probes are possible, nobody capable of building one would be stupid enough to do so (per Sagan/Newman),
3. Even if Von Neumann Probes are possible and someone did send them, their actual behaviour in the wild is very different from what we expect and this is the reason why we haven’t observed them,
4. Even if Von Neumann Probes are possible and someone did send them and they behave exactly as we expect, they’ve only been launched recently and haven’t progressed far enough for us to spot them,
5. There’s nobody to send Von Neumann Probes, because we’re alone in the galaxy.
To go from “we’re not seeing any VNPs” to “there’s nobody else out there” is to dismiss every other possible explanation for what we’re observing – as classic an example of affirming the consequent as ever there was.
It is certainly possible that the observed lack of VNPs is due to there being nobody to send them, but we have no way of telling, because we have no way of discarding the alternative explanations. Any probabilities you care to assign to them will be numbers pulled out of your… hat, because we’ve not actually observed any instance of an actual Von Neumann Probe.
The first hypothesis (VNPs are impossible) at least has the advantage of parsimony, because we don’t have to assume anything else about the universe for it to give good predictions.
Sometimes things seem less offensive in my head than on paper. It is a common fault of mine. I’m sorry.
I assume the n unknowns are the n premises? If yes, then I agree it is very hard to assign explicitly probabilities to things (though there are some people who are surprisingly great at that, but that is a story for an other time). However, you and I do that all the time implicitly: eg. we categorize things as impossible, almost impossible, highly unlikely, unlikely, 50-50, likely, highly likely, almost certain, certain. What are these words if not words referring to ranges of probabilities? Furthermore, we also can argue using these words: eg. I can say that: “If I will have eggs for breakfeast tomorrow, then I should go to the shop to buy eggs.”. And as I said I often eat eggs, but not always. Now, don’t you agree that I made a valid argument for the statement: “I should go to the shop.”? (If our common implicit assumption is that “It is highly likely that I will eat eggs tomorrow”) Even though, you can’t give an explicit probability to “I will have eggs tomorrow”, you feel its approximate likeliness in your bones. Just as with the VNPs: Yeah, I can’t give you an exact number, but based on my knowledge about the world, mechanisms, rate of technological progress, abilities of current AI, I think that it is highly likely that they are possible. It is, of course, completely okay if you disagree with me on this, I don’t have a problem with it. Consequently, I don’t want to convince you to my view that probes are highly likely. The thing I want to convince you about is that when someone says something like: “Based on the lack of von Neuman probes, we can say that there are probably no alien civilizations”. They don’t make an invalid argument for the reason that it is not certain that VNPs are possible (which is an implicit assumption of his). Note: I don’t even think that it is a good argument, because of irrelevant reasons to our conversation, but it is not invalid for the reason that there are unknown assumptions.
The argument might be invalid for you, because you do not believe one of its assumptions are highly likely, but that does not make it invalid for others. The above argument is basically a reminder to every reader that they should add their implicitly estimated probability of the viability of VNPs (muliplied by the other implicit premises) to their estimated probability of “no other alien civilizations”. This is not an invalid argument. It might be weak, but not invalid.
So, the goal of my first comment was to convince you that the outlined reasoning is valid. Now it seems that we reached an agreement on this, but maybe we disagree on what you’ve said in your first comment, but I’m not sure arguing about that is productive. One minor point: It is not just “valid for a probabilistic value of valid” whatever you meant with that phrase. The outlined reasoning is unquestionably valid, as valid as anything can be, as valid as 1+1=2, in fact I can even prove it for you for any sensible definition of highly likely:
p(B)=p(B intersect A)+p(B intersect not A)>p(B intersect A)=p(B|A)*p(A) and p(B|A) is 1, so P(B)>p(A).
I don’t see what “know” you are talking about.
Later in your post you argue about the viability of VNPs and why those famous people’s argument is weak, sometimes I agree with you, sometimes less so, but I don’t want to challenge you on that, the reason for my comments was to challenge your metaargument, ie. the argument against other argument’s validness.
Unless faster-than-light travel (or at least communication) is invented, interstellar travel would be more or less useless to those left behind. What would be the point in sending away a robot to explore if we never hear back from it?
When trying to argue about it two comments ago i assumed automated probe sent to nearby solar system is not exceedingly costly and is able to provide scientific insights, both potential theoretical insights from travelling through interstellar space at near c velocities and observational data gathered in another solar system that would otherwise be unavailable from interstellar distances.
Btw, from my understanding, impossibility of FTL communication and travel is one and the same from the scientific point of view.
This is correct. This subsection of Atomic Rockets will explain it far better than I ever could. FTL and Causality
If we get away from Von Neumann probes and just talk about probes generally, I agree with this. The issue is that it doesn’t necessarily raise questions about the Fermi Paradox if we’re just talking about regular probes. Space is big (which is why the Fermi Parodox suggests there should be alien life even for very low values of various parameters), so even if there is alien life out there they may not be “nearby” (in space or time). Not to mention what others have brought up in that there very well could be (non-replicating) probes in or around the solar system.
I remember (probably here, or while I was doing a dive on the Fermi Paradox as a result of a conversation here) seeing something that inferred how close we should expect the nearest civilization to be based on various values plugged into the Fermi Paradox but I can’t remember what kind of results it gave. If I can find it again I’ll link it here so people with a better understanding of the Fermi terms can play with it.
One additional point against Von Neumann probes specifically…curiosity about the rest of the universe does not necessarily lead to a desire to convert the rest of the universe into probes. I wouldn’t expect an advanced civilization to create a bunch of probes that will gradually convert all matter in the universe into probes (including the launching civilization) any more than I would expect us to go cut down every tree in the Amazon so we can count/examine the rings.
Curiosity calls for a lighter touch. In the hypothetical civilization where they have figured out how to make them, I would expect the civilization to be opposed to using them. If some rogue scientist/nation decides to launch one anyway I would guess a civilization that advanced would have the capability to destroy it before it replicated itself to a point beyond control.
I can’t help but be reminded of Star Control II, where culling another civilization’s deployment of Von Neumann Probes (to be fair, it was a misunderstanding and they were really sorry about the whole affair) was a significant plot point.
So, the lack of VNPs may be due to the fact that they’ve all been rounded up and dismantled under the Galactic Environmental Preservation Act.
I am heavily tempted to try and obtain a copy of that game now, I had never heard of it before.
Here it is on GOG.com.
A few billions of years ago, the universe looked very different. There were superclusters, but they were dark, boring places, filled with quindecillions of kilograms of miscellaneous hadrons, signifying little.
Fortunately for our story, even that little was enough. The variance in density was just enough to create irregularities – knots of material that, once formed, inexorably gathered their surroundings into themselves. It took a long time, but time was immaterial to this material. The knots drifted together, until one of them happened upon an improbable trick. This knot was able to make a copy of itself. It only had to happen once. A septillion kilograms became copies of this knot, in less time than the first knot had originally formed.
Once that happened, the majestic supercluster experienced a rapid transformation. In an even shorter span of time, the knot evolved an even weirder feature, the ability to guide its own replication. To neighboring superclusters, it would have appeared as nothing one eon, and an incomprehensible explosion the next, as the supercluster collapsed into tendrils of dark knotty order, and then a fleet of shining swirls. A tredecillion kilograms of inchoate drift pushed into hundreds of billions of spheres, shining with the heat of the ordeal.
And still the “knot” spread, jumping to its supercluster neighbor. Then another, and still another. What was a dark universe was almost completely replaced by a vast space of swirling, shining pools, guarded by even brighter spinning balls at its periphery, by the time the knot finally expended itself.
If that weren’t unbelievable enough, more phenomena followed in the knot’s wake. For the one-in-a-septillion event that created the first knot, happened again. Another compound – on the fringe of a cooled sphere circling a yellow sphere, itself swirling about another – achieved self-replication. It took a mere one billion trips around its local star before it, too, evolved the ability to control itself, and began its own transformation of the matter around it.
Peculiarly, at the dawn of its self-mastery, believing it was old, yet so young to the system around it, it grew to contemplate the possibility that another compound like it could arise, spread, and dominate the universe around it. It would be only several hundred more trips around its yellow-hot ball before it recognized that that had already happened.
—
Imagine we develop technology that could seed another star system. Presumably it’s a huge project, and we could do if it all pulled together as a species and made great sacrifices, BUT 1000 years of progress later (or less or more, doesn’t matter if it’s 100000 years), it’s perhaps something that a decent nation state could do itself, and after yet later years of progress later one man can do from his garage. Depending on how technology progresses and absence of complete catastrophe in that time.
What you want is not that a species will do it when it first becomes viable and ROI is possibly governing, but that no-one or sect will/can do it for whatever idiosyncractic reason a hundred thousand of years after the technology first becomes available in its most expensive form. Because (handwaving and oversimplifying) it only takes once.
That is, thinking about species-level economics and imperatives could be misleading. It probably is wrong if we think about humanity specifically, unless we wipe ourselves out shortly. If a million years from now, any small group of humans could do this by themselves, is there any doubt that (unless humanity has changed beyond recognition) that someone WILL do so? And with no regard to ROI.
Objection to my objection: what if initially gaining the ability to expand as a species is for some reason always a near-immediate precursor to technological stagnation or complete destruction? Not “often” but “always”. This seems contrived.
At least one Nobel-prize-winning economist disagrees with you on that.
But the phrase “return on investment” is misleading here, as it implies the gains must literally return to their geographic origin. Most historic migration of most terrestrial species, including humanity, is for the benefit of the migrants rather than those who stayed behind. The assumption that all alien species will refrain from interstellar expansion because all extraterrestrial wealth is locked down by the equivalent capitalists whose only goal is to best fill the money-bins in their basement, that this pattern of behavior which is atypical among historic humanity will be absolutely universal among aliens, is implausible. But if you’re going to explain the Fermi paradox that way, you need it to be universal.
I don’t know, those who stay behind get the land, the home, and the purchasing price of the materials purchased for migration.
To draw a sick parallel, there was a benefit to the remaining Christians when the Jews and Muslims were forcefully expelled from European countries.
Which is why none of those Europeans ever emigrated en-masse to America/Oceania, or anything.
When you’re ethnically cleansing a place, you get the suff the emigrants got when you chased them off with guns, but when they peacefully emigrate, they get to sell anything they don’t want to bring with them. (e.g. said land, home)
As Lambert says, when this is done peacefully the migrants sell their land/home/etc for $X and use that to buy $X worth of migration stuff, which they take with them. So the stay-behinds gain $X in land/homes/etc but have to cough up $X in other stuff for it, net gain of maybe $0.2X assuming reasonably efficient markets.
The first wave of migrants trade $X worth of land and home for $0.8X worth of supplies with which to build a new home on nigh-infinite free land. The deal gets slightly worse for each new wave until equilibrium is reached. Most of the benefit goes to the migrants.
Thread for discussing place names that conjure inaccurate mental images.
Foggy Bottom: I imagine white men in suits whose butts are shrouded by a perpetual fog, perhaps because the terrain is The Hound of the Baskervilles type moorland.
Hell, Michigan: Detroit, but with jets of flame erupting from the ground.
In comparison, Paradise, Michigan.
By that name, it ought to be replete with angelic choirs; it ought to be a restful place with no disease, turmoil, or strife.
Failing that, the climate should be comparable to a beautiful tropical island.
(I’ve driven through Paradise a few times. It’s a nice little town, but it’s under snow for several months of the year. So it fails the tropical island test. And I never saw any angelic choirs… )
If we’re talking Michigan, you can’t leave out Climax or Bad Axe.
It’s a long way from Climax but you might also check out Cumming (GA).
So, Detroit.
Greenland & Iceland are probably the most famous examples
Coming back: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Turkey
“What do you mean, the nation of Turkey doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving! Is it because the citizens are actual turkeys, who don’t want to be eaten?”
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea;
The People’s Republic of China;
The Democratic Republic of Congo;
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic.
As a general rule, any country which feels compelled to announce that it is Democratic, the People’s, or a Republic is none of the above.
What about a country that has to announce it is “United”?
I kid. Sorta.
You’re not wrong. The United Kingdom is anything but these days and the United States of America doesn’t seem much better.
Is the United States of Mexico an exception to that, though?
From my understanding, no.
Mexico has some pretty severe internal divisions between El Norte and the rest of Mexico.
Have any of them declared themselves Rey en El Norte yet?
(And if so, are they trying to get the wall built themselves?)
“Phoenix.”
Burning fire, lots of flights. Sounds pretty appropriate.
Flaming hot, and rose from the ashes of a previous city. What more do you want for “Phoenix”?
ETA: Semi-ninja’d by Elementaldex
The names of Chicago suburbs, in general, lead you to expect a good deal more Heights, Ridges, Hills, and Highlands than are actually present.
West, Texas is in the eastern half of Texas.
Iceland does indeed have enough ice to qualify, just as Ireland has enough… angry people. Greenland breaks this trend.
Nantucket has no apparent men of prodigious proportions.
@Le Maistre Chat says:
Downtown Oakland, California isn’t a forest, and doesn’t look like Lothlorien.
As mentioned elsewhere in this Open Thread: Paradise, California burned down.
@ Plumber:
This makes me wonder, have any paving companies put up a parking lot since that happened?
If you speak the languages:
Bangkok and Düsseldorf are a “village”.
The Goyder Line sounds line mumblesomethingblah iodine deficiency.
Can anyone recommend any good resources for crossing over from being a beginner coder to a intermediate coder?
My current status is that I can pretty much answer any discrete question or problem anyone comes to me with. I’m the “that guy” of the office where whenever anyone has a task that would otherwise be incredibly repetitive or time consuming, they come to me and I generally find a way to automate it. As an example – the last big project I did, a team had been storing critical data in a gmail inbox for 5 years and not bothering to keep any kind of analytics. I found a way to parse through around 14000 emails to get that data and export it to excel.
The thing is, I might be getting results, but I still feel like a novice when doing these kinds of tasks. I’m not writing beautiful, object oriented code; I’m basically hacking together a pastiche of guesswork and other people’s work I stole off of Stack Overflow.
I’d like to get better, but I’m not sure what a next step would be – I’ve tried a couple of the online “learn coding” apps, but they all seem aimed at a complete novice, which isn’t really where I’m at. Anyone have any good suggestions?
I find I learn the most from building things that have a definite purpose. If you lack a new purpose, try re-building something from scratch that you slapped together out of multiple different tools in a way that’s better.
Try to work on a larger existing codebase that has some of the qualities you want to be able to create yourself (likely some opensource project). Try to add some not-completely-trivial feature, or try to track down bugs (understanding how the code is supposed to work, and why it doesn’t).
Learn data structures – linked lists, binary trees, sparse matrices, hashtables – well enough to be able to write one from scratch, even though your language of choice provides one, and understand why one will perform certain operations better than another. You’ll need to know performance tradeoffs of basic data structures like these in order to analyze performance problems in more complicated code in any sort of reasonable time.
Learn LISP and Prolog well enough to understand why functional languages are studied. Then, if you want, set them aside.
The above is to force yourself to get the necessary theory under your belt. With that done, you can shoulder more practical tasks. What you do next will depend on what sort of intermediate projects you’d like to specialize in. Some examples:
Get a copy of MySQL, build a database in it, and then write a program that puts data in it and pulls it back out. Then set up a web server (Apache and nginx are the top ones) and run them. Then write web page code that does the same database operations that your program did.
Get a game development kit such as Pygame or one of the HTML5 engines, and write a game complex enough that you would enjoy it.
Choose a language in common use, and write various programs that will make your life easier. Consider writing apps that will run on your phone. Write a few completely by hand first, and then write them in an IDE.
Have you read a complete book about whatever language you are working with? If not, start with that. And if it has exercises, do a few. For Java, Effective Java by Joshua Bloch is a good one for people who already know the basics.
You should also learn something about datastructures and fundamental algorithms, the heart of computer science. There are many books that teach this material, using several different languages. Here is one in Java.
You might also try reading these more general books. Then try to apply their advice to your work.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt
Code Complete by Steve McConnell
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
Building Maintainable Software by Joost Visser
Digging deeper, you should read something about software testing, but I’m not sure what to recommend. For now, let me just ask this question. Do you write any tests for your code at all?
Learn Python The Hard Way is good from a data science perspective.
What language are you learning? Why are you learning it? What type of tasks do you want to accomplish? It’s hard to recommend resources without knowing what your goals are. I have recommendations for R but not Python, for example.
cassander’s suggestion is a good one: Having a reason for doing something or a thing you’re building is immensely helpful, even if you have to invent the project yourself.
*shudders* Those two aren’t compatible. OOP is not for application code, at least not in 99% of non-school situations. It’s brilliant for libraries and auxiliary stuff, but when it comes to designing the business logic of your app, you want functional code, not object oriented.
That’s actually a fallacy that comes from (extremely) naive examples in OOP programming. You have a class Car, with a subclass Truck, with an instance that’s your car. That’s good for understanding how classes work, but this never ever ever ever happens in production code. Ever. Not even close. And some of the worst spaghetti code possible happens by trying to force it.
As for your question, it looks like you’re already intermediate and want to move up. That’s a lot harder, since I haven’t seen any way to do this other than just be in the industry for 10+ years. I can think of a few things that might help:
– mentoring – be around people that know their shit
– work on interesting problems, ideally on a big system with a lot of data used by a lot of people.
– learn Lisp, or whatever its modern equivalent is.
Since only the third is a practical suggestion: I did that some 10 years ago. Might have been a coincidence, but that’s the point where I think I could have called myself a senior dev. I didn’t write much production code in it – I have a now defunct app and some libraries written in Clojure (which I recommend btw), but the way it forced me to think about code as data is something that will stay with me forever. There’s a bunch of concepts you don’t really find anywhere else. And I have a sneaking suspicion that all the big guys had a functional programming phase at some point.
+1 I inherited a piece-of-crap command line tool written in C++ that other people (not just me) refer to as an “unmaintainable horror” and worse. The way it uses classes mostly detracts from maintainability.
I rewrote half of it from scratch last year – and now all its most important functions are handled by code that people can understand, and enhance. I completely changed languages in the process, to avoid managerial temptation to insist I reuse old code. The replacement does a lot that the old code couldn’t handle, and colleagues actually send me pull requests now instead of insisting that I do everything personally.
Moving the rest of its functions out of the old code remains on my “to do” list for this year. Management disagrees – they have other priorities – but every bug I fix in it will probably somehow result in nuking more of that pustulent mess. (I’ll keep most of it in C++, because of the need to move gradually.)
I don’t know how much of the disaster was caused by the incompetence of the original developer, or the complete lack of documentation of what the classes actually do, rather than simply by using classes where they weren’t optimal. But it’ll be my go to example of bad OO code for a long time.
I do a huge chunk of my coding in C#. Using classes and following good OO principles is immensely helpful in what I do.
I also do a huge chunk of my coding in SQL stored procedures. Following OO principles there is obviously not possible, nor would I want to switch to something like Java (which could be possible, depending on the DB).
It’s a huge mistake to dismiss OO principles as a general case. You can right bad OO code, you can write bad procedural code, you can write bad code in pre-structural languages like COBOL.
You can also write good code in all of these paradigms.
True. I should have quoted a bit more of what Radu Floricica said above, where he suggests it’s overused in application code.
I don’t think object orientation was very suitable to the particular program I inherited, and I’m sure it was used within that program in areas where it was just plain silly. And there’s a place in hell for people who abuse
autothe way this author did.For other purposes, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, though I’d personally prefer to use almost any other OO language rather than C++. And in my experience – which is of course limited – most of those places which I’ve personally encountered have been in operating systems.
The real trick is to use the right tool for the job, and use it well.
I suspect if your described your projects, or showed me your code, I’d agree you were using the right tool – and if I showed you the program I inherited, you’d tend to wonder aloud what moron wrote it.
Strongly disagree on this as a general principle. Yes, OO languages give you more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. And more expressive languages give you even more tools you can use wrongly (e.g., C++ lets you create a mess in ways that Java won’t allow you to consider).
However, used properly (and it takes a lot of training to achieve this) OOP gives you tools to make your app scalable, maintainable, and readable by future poor souls (including your future self) who will be working on the same project.
In a way there is a progression of complexity in software design: from machine instructions, to functions, to data structures and algorithms, to encapsulation/inheritance/polymorphism, to design patterns. The only legitimate reason you might want to design things on a lower level is getting rid of complexity due to speed or hardware constraints.
TL;DR: OP, please don’t dismiss OOP before you get a consensus among people you trust telling you it is a good idea.
You didn’t mention the programming language you use. You could have received more specific advice.
Object-oriented code is just one of multiple choices; although, if that’s the one you choose, it’s worth learning to do it properly. But there are other things that make code nice:
* Use names — of variables, constants, functions, classes, etc. — that express well what given part of code means. It is difficult to read code where the variables are just called “a”, “b”, “c”. And when it’s difficult to read, it is also difficult to find bugs, or to add more functionality later. On the other hand, don’t make the names unnecessarily long. It helps if you know the standard words expressing the concept you are using. For example, “numberOfCustomers” is better than “n”, but also better than “howManyPeopleBuyThingsInOurShop”.
* Split the code into smaller parts. (How small exactly, that depends on language.) If a function has hundred lines, or a class has hundred methods or hundred variables, it probably can — and should — be split into multiple parts. And each part should be properly named.
* Documentation. The rule of thumb is that the name of the function says WHAT, the code says HOW, and the documentation says WHY. Don’t write retarded documentation such as: “Function ‘customer.getName’ returns the name of the customer”. On the other hand, it may be worth mentioning whether the customer’s “name” is actually the surname, the first name followed by the surname, or perhaps the surname followed by the first name, or any of the above.
You can take some short code you already wrote, try to improve it given these guidelines, and share it here to get feedback what others would have done differently.
In addition to this, you should get familiar with the following:
* Algorithms and data structures. (What is a “linked list”, what is a “hash map”, and why would anyone want to use it. What is the difference between “quick sort” and “bubble sort”.)
* Computational complexity. Not too much detail, just knowing what words like “quadratic” and “exponential” mean with regards to time or memory, and being able to tell which one applies to your program.
* Design patterns; best practices.
* Automatic testing. Also, use programs that analyze your code and show you the problems, and then fix them.
For theoretical education, you might want to try some problem-solving websites, such as Project Euler.
On the China vs. Basketball front, this is now apparently a thing. I was skeptical of the first reports on net-of-a-million-lies grounds, but Reuters usually doesn’t screw up brute facts like this. ESPN is implicitly endorsing the nine, er, ten-dash line, and this is no longer plausibly just an issue of China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong.
And, WTF? Why would anyone think this is a good idea? It’s hard to see this as any sort of accident; that graphic doesn’t exist outside of China unless you deliberately commission it, or you get it from the Chinese, or you find it in a folder labeled “Really Controversial Chinese Geopolitical Stuff”. But after the backlash they got over the Hong Kong bit, are the NBA and their ESPN overlords(*) really going to want to double down on endorsing Chinese hegemony well beyond China’s generally accepted borders? Is even Beijing foolish enough to think now is the time for this? Yes, they have the power, but they don’t securely have the power, not when Congress is expressing bipartisan discontent. I’d have expected them to wait until the present furor dies down before ramping up their game like this.
* Or did I get that backwards?
ESPN could probably reasonably be described as the overlords of a lot of college athletics, but in the case of the NBA/ESPN relationship I would say they are probably solidly partners.
Warning, CW:
ESPN is Disney. Disney employs bean counters who do risk analysis of possible boycotts, and they found that getting boycotted by the Chinese Communist Party is a big risk and getting boycotted by conservatives domestically is a very small risk, or even a net gain.
Disney’s willingness to use a map claiming Chinese rule of Arunachal Pradesh indicates that a billion Indians don’t buy enough Disney products to make them care about offending India.
Now I’m feeling like my analysis is less CW and more cyberpunk. When is Japan going to send in ninja with cybernetic implants because they feel threatened by China’s growing power?
AFAIK support/condemnation for China doesn’t map onto Liberal/Conservative domestically. I don’t know how it trends, or how it will shake out, but for right now at least this issue crosses party lines.
I mean, just take this board for example – I’m pretty sure China is literally the only issue I’ve ever totally agreed with Echo Chaos about.
I’m not disagreeing with you. Disney has completely amoral positions on multiple political issues or axes. They see Chinese citizens as a huge revenue source and so will take positions to milk that cash cow. When American citizens are in tribal conflict, they see the progressives as the bigger cash cow. There could be any number of other positions the chief executives have decided to take based on what the bean counters tell them.
Hoorah!
I think the reason for this is that China isn’t leftist enough anymore for lefties to support it, but it isn’t really right-wing either.
Was support for China ever really a leftist position? I mean, maybe super far left (as in legitimate full-on communists/Marxists, not the quasi-socialism/democratic-socialism that has gained some popularity recently) back when they might have thought China was going to be a “real communist country” or whatever but that was never a particularly large or empowered group here.
@acymetric: they were large enough that John Lennon wrote a song lyric criticizing support for Chairman Mao, then regretfully said “I never should have put in that line about Chairman Mao.”
(Compare the reaction to “the Beatles are bigger than Jesus.”)
@acymetric:
Anecdotally, I’ve met more than a few liberal-by-default types with a pretty positive view of Mao. Probably they wouldn’t have had that view if they actually knew what he did, but people who don’t care too much about politics while also expressing tribal affiliation (normal people) often adopt whatever attitude seems to be the default in their social circle.
I haven’t met anyone willing to defend Xi, though (in America).
Support may be a little strong, but my impression is that a lot of people on the left had a generally positive view of Maoist China. And not limited to the left. When Mao died, the Economist‘s obituary credited him with ending famine in China.
China’s upset, this is when they want to appease them the _most_. What’s the US going to do about it? Nothing, the First Amendment protects them from government backlash and their enormous Western propaganda machine as well as the fickle nature of the public protect them from non-government backlash.
Although they could have had the courtesy to at least put a trollface icon on Taiwan.
I dunno. If they annoy the government enough, copyright might mysteriously get reduced to the Berne Convention minimum.
People seem to make a lot of noise about these things, but nothing material has really happened as a clear response, I think. So, maybe the CPC is willing to try their luck on this? Maybe I underestimate the importance of ESPN, but if this leads to anything at all it probably won’t be too harsh and if it doesn’t then it’s a clear signal to them that the CPC can push a bit further.
Also, possibly the CPC is factionalist enough that this was done for domestic political reasons. If this is as significant as you seem to imply, then maybe it’s a good way for Xi to placate the nationalists in the CPC.
Still, I’m a little doubtful that the CPC did anything at all rather than it being an independent action by ESPN, for the reasons you cite.
(I’ll seriously consider forgiving ESPN if they put a star on Taipei in the future, though.)
For the same reason most of processed food is now hallal in western europe: when you got a population that will never consume (either because their religion tells them not to, or because the party blocked the diffusion in your country) products that lack a certain component (either religious rules or a very generous map), while the general population don’t really care about it, you have no reason not to cave in to the minority, because it’s profit at cost.
I meant profit at *no* cost, obviously.
But it’s not profit at zero cost. It’s profit at small cost, or risk, yes. But the cost and risk would be smaller still after one more news cycle, and news cycles are measured in weeks. So why now?
>Chinese hegemony well beyond China’s generally accepted borders?
The kind of soft power influence that China has is not unique to China. All countries whether Israel (especially Israel) or America do the kind of thing China is doing. Its just latent Sinophobia motivating the current outrage.
>Uncharitable. Can you think of other relevant differences between the USA and China (in e.g. human rights records, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, etc.) that might cause people to treat alleged interference by the two countries differently?
If people said all kinds of corporate soft power influence like what China has exhibited was bad and criticised all instances then that would fine. The Sinophobia is the blind eye being turned when non-China actors do it such as Israel, with its abysmal human rights record and the United States with its fellow abysmal human rights record.
The United States of America does not draw lines on maps enclosing international waters many hundreds of miles from shore and say “This is our sovereign territory; you may pass only by our permission”.
The United States of America does not point to de facto independent nation-states and say “This is our sovereign territory; if the people who live there do not accept our dominion, we’re eventually going to invade and conquer them”.
And the United States does not deny US market access to foreign commercial entities on the basis that some of their employees once publicly disputed US geopolitical claims.
These are real differences between the US and China, between just about everybody else in the world and China, and pointing that out is not “sinophobia”
The bit where you’re going to point to things the US has done that are vaguely and superficially similar to the things that China has done and say “See, the US and China are the same, just like I said”, is not going to be worth engaging, but you’re going to do it anyway so have at it.
>The United States of America does not draw lines on maps enclosing international waters many hundreds of miles from shore and say “This is our sovereign territory; you may pass only by our permission”.
I have no idea what this has to do with anything I said. I clarified corporate soft power.
>The United States of America does not point to de facto independent nation-states and say “This is our sovereign territory; if the people who live there do not accept our dominion, we’re eventually going to invade and conquer them”.
China is saying this to who exactly? Taiwan is not a nation state. Its to China what the Confederacy was the Union.
Although you are right, the USA does not do this, what they do is bomb their children with drones.
>And the United States does not deny US market access to foreign commercial entities on the basis that some of their employees once publicly disputed US geopolitical claims.
Not as of yet, although their is that BDS bill Macro Rubio and others are pushing and they do threaten governments (Ukraine for instance) which is much much worse. You don’t care about this though because you worship the state. Regardless your whole argument seems to be “China does it more therefore I don’t care if the US does it so I’m going to carry on ignoring it.”
>he bit where you’re going to point to things the US has done that are vaguely and superficially similar to the things that China has done and say “See, the US and China are the same, just like I said”, is not going to be worth engaging, but you’re going to do it anyway so have at it.
The “not worth replying to” slogan is always the last shriek of those without arguments when they see their whole Pentagon-fed worldview crumbling around them.
Taiwan is more similar to the Confederate settlements in Brazil. No one would have thought it reasonable for the United States to claim this territory in the 20th century, and they did not. Also, fighting bush wars is not the same thing as staking claims to territory.
The anti-BDS bills are obscene, and I hope/think that in the long run they seriously damage the relationship between the US and the individuals and organizations pushing them. At any rate, they have not been conclusively established as legitimate in the US.
As John Schilling said, the US and China have some similarities, but they are not the same. Perhaps you prefer China and its way of doing business to the US, but this doesn’t require you to endorse everything they do.
@sfoil
How on earth would they be comparable? Taiwan is as Chinese as Beijing. They speak the same language, celebrate the same holidays, eat the same food etc and the inhabitants are not colonial settlers.
The USA has no leg to stand on when it comes to such matters, they claim the territories of Hawaii, Guam, Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico
Your splitting hairs
@An Fírinne
Yes, the inhabitants of Taiwan are indeed colonial settlers. On the order of magnitude of US settlers vs indigenous peoples ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_indigenous_peoples ).
– The inhabitants of Hawaii have more political rights than the inhabitants of mainland China.
– Guam has had multiple referenda on it’s political future: https://www.guampedia.com/guams-political-status/ . Granted, the federal government hasn’t done anything to allow the implementation of these referenda, but it hasn’t prevented the referenda from taking place either. And it sure as hell hasn’t punished the native population for holding them.
– Guantanamo Bay has no permanent residents (other than US military and prisoners). And the US is still technically paying Cuba rent for the land (Cuba simply refrains from cashing the check). Given tenant rights in most of the US (difficulty of expelling people from rental properties), the US can hardly be said to be hypocritical here.
– Puerto Rico likewise has had multiple referenda.
And China has nothing whatsoever that can compare to the Marshall Islands or the Philippines.
China, on the other hand, wants to ignore the choice of the Taiwanese to be an independent state, threatening military action when the topic is brought up. It also directly conquered Tibet. Far more recently than any US conquests (and frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Polk’s conquest of half of Mexico, much less the “winning of the West”).
Do the Uighur or Tibetans have as much autonomy on their lands as the Utes or Cherokee have on theirs?
So yeah, while the US may not have two legs to stand on, it at least has one leg to stand on.
The best is not the enemy of the better.
Also, based on the original rental terms, and the legally recognized chain of inheritance, either the principle descendant of the last Emperor, or the government of Taiwan (as the lineal inheritor of the KMT, itself the legally recognized inheritor of the last Emperor) should have received title to Hong Kong. Yet the PRC demanded that they be recognized as inheritor despite these legally stronger claims.
What does this have to do with anything? This is basically true of the US and Canada. Would you support US claims to Ontario on the basis of being the true representative of Anglo culture in North America?
I’m actually curious why you’re so willing to accept the Chinese claim to own Taiwan on the basis of “common culture”. These sorts of claims are exactly what gave nationalism a bad name in the twentieth century. Speaking of which, you should be aware that claiming that some polity “isn’t a real nation state” is pretty much the go-to justification for wars of conquest post-1945. Maybe you support the Chinese conquest of Taiwan — there are plenty of good reasons to do so, of which “being on the good side of the Chinese Communist Party” is one of the big ones — but as someone with presumably not much personally invested in the outcome, I don’t know why you would get worked up at the idea that Taiwan’s current government and its supporters opposes this.
No, I’m not. Even if you think that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a war of conquest (a reasonable case could be made) and more destructive than a hypothetical Taiwan War would be (I doubt it, although it’s not certain), it isn’t actually an argument that the PRC’s position and designs on Taiwan are objectively correct. Even if the United States had spent the last fifty years fighting to put the entire New World from the Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego under the Stars and Stripes this would be true.
@anonymousskimmer
Most Taiwanese have colonial ancestors but they themselves are not colonial settlers. They’ve been there for at the very least centuries.
Once again the latent Sinophobia shows threw the cracks in the argument. The United States has indigenous peoples but that doesn’t mean non-Native Americans should not have sovereignty over say Washington DC or California. If the PRC is not obliged to make sovereignty claims over Taiwan because it has indigenous peoples then the US Government has no right to claim sovereignty over any inch of North America. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
This all irrelevant. The US is making claims on territories it has no right too. Also if Hawaii had a vote tomorrow and voted to form an Independent Republic of Hawaii are you really so naïve as to believe that the US Government would accept such a democratic vote as legitimate? Of course not! Same goes for Guam or anywhere else.
>China, on the other hand, wants to ignore the choice of the Taiwanese to be an independent state, threatening military action when the topic is brought up. It also directly conquered Tibet. Far more recently than any US conquests (and frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Polk’s conquest of half of Mexico, much less the “winning of the West”).
Do the Uighur or Tibetans have as much autonomy on their lands as the Utes or Cherokee have on theirs?
I should clarify that I do not support the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the East Turkistan but I do recognise this – Taiwan is Chinese and the USA has its own colonial mindset which cannot be denied.
No, it isn’t irrelevant.
You obviously don’t want to argue, so I won’t. That doesn’t mean your statements win, it just means you’re close-minded to any sort of nuance whatsoever, including massively large differences of kind.
Taiwan has never, ever been governed by the PRC.
Here’s a comic for you: https://amultiverse.com/comic/2019/10/07/the-actual-victim/
@anonymousskimmer
This is a very poor response. The cliché “yea bro well your personal attack A, personal B and refusal to address points” is not something I would expect from a “rationalist”. Its very disappointing actually, even though my expectations were admittingly low.
It does not need to be to have a legitimate claim, although if we are going to play this game Mainland China and Taiwan have been united for centuries under the Chinese Empire and under the subsequent Republic of China which was set up in 1912 following the Xinhai Revolution.
For the record Taiwan has just as much of a legitimate claim to Mainland China as Mainland China does to Taiwan. People like yourself know nothing about he culture and history of Taiwan and are merely pro-Taiwan for no other reason then you are Anti-China.
Stop calling me names, I’m not a Rationalist.
Stop lumping me in with other people by assuming my worldview based solely on how I distinguish US imperialism from Chinese imperialism.
Less of this, please.That is not the case. Imperial China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. It only became Chinese again, under the Nationalist government,
in 1945.It was also a Dutch colony in the 17th century.
Last Year, Scott considered a hypothetical scenario to declare war on Cost Disease in Medicine.
Flash forward to today, and a doctor in Pittsburgh is fighting the good fight. Although right now, it looks like at $35 a visit, here’s only making enough to break even on expenses without paying himself a salary.
Yeah, this model is not scalable. He has 4 patients a day, call it $2800 per month in revenue, which he claims cover his expenses. The article claims a maximum revenue of $180,000 per year, but that means taking 20 patients a day. How many hours a day is that? 10, at least? And when you back out the 2800/month=34k a year in expenses, that means $146k for his entire salary, which is absolute shit pay for an educated professional, especially one working 10+ hours a day with no vacations (ever). Keep in mind that would be the equivalent of your 401k and medical contributions included in that $146k, plus whatever else.
Also, who is maintaining your EMR? This guy? Who is managing appointment schedules? Who is sending reminder emails and calling patients to come in for their appointments?
Oh, and all the above assumes a 0% return on capital, and 0 budget for any major unexpected items. God help you if your malpractice insurance rates spike.
Price discrimination? The way airlines manage to fly a plane by charging $10 a seat – they charge a lot more for some of the seats.
You have a basic cheap service ($35 visit) with a bunch of add-ons. IANAD, but stuff like ultrasound, drawing blood for tests, no-appointment/skip the line visit etc could easily make the same 30 minutes visit worth $80-$100, while still providing good value to the patient. These are examples of common practices in the non-insurance based clinics I use.
As for managing appointments, you just need to invest a weekend in researching a decent software. Rent and maintenance will cut into your profit, of course, but I still see this as a decent business.
What I don’t understand is why aren’t there companies providing these services to doctors for less than half of what an employee costs. I have a sneaking suspicion in the end the answer is “regulatory reasons”.
I think that this model could work, but 20 patients a day is far too few. When I see a doctor, I rarely see the doctor for even 10 minutes. Get that down to 5 on average, and a doctor can see 10 patients an hour–at that point, you have something that can pay a doctor and 2 nurses. Round to 1600 billable hours a year, 10 patients an hour–you’re looking at two nurses at $50,000, costs of $35,000, and still paying the doctor $250,000. (I’m assuming that benefits cost 50% of salary–so (250+50+50)*1.5+35 = 1600 *10 *35.)
The key to making it more profitable is to get the doctor’s time down, and replace it with cheaper providers. I think with a good nurse, and two adjunct professonals to take blood pressure/weight/history, a doctor could spend 2 minutes with the median patient (typical case: needs a new prescription for albuterol inhaler, or needs ears checked to see if this earache is an ear infection) and 10 minutes with the complicated ones, and average 15 patients an hour.
Use nurse practitioners to decrease costs. Doesn’t even need to see the doc, for typical cases.
@Chipsa says:
I’ve been seen by nurse practitioners and I can’t tell the difference in treatment between then and general practitioner physicians, except that nurse practitioners usually seem more authoritative than physicians as they are usually taller than average middle-aged and older women (while most other nurses seem shorter than average) while most physicians now are women that are usually around average height and look student aged.
The few old male physicians left seem more authoritative than the nurse practitioners, but they’re pretty rare now, and the rare young male physicians are hard for me take seriously at all (yes I realize that this is all prejudice rather than reason on my part).
Yeah, I found it interesting that he ended up choosing the same price point as Scott ($35) but didn’t use many any of the cost saving measures. Perhaps he’s still working out a way of how it could work in his line of care.
I think one model that might be interesting, but am personally unsure about the medical ethics/preventing-abuse around is a clinic that has both a physician and a pharmacist on site so you can obtain a prescription immediately after a diagnosis.
It seems like the cost saving measures from sharing a facility and record keeping system for patients between the pharmacist and the physician would make it worthwhile, but again the only place I see this happening are the compassionate-care clinics which are basically a one-stop-shop for getting someone a medical marijuana prescription, with all the baggage that comes with that.
Scott Summer worries that libertarians are being purged from the GOP:
https://www.econlib.org/are-libertarians-being-purged/
The difference between the example of the Conservative Party in the U.K. and the Republican Party in the U.S. is that the former had a long-running conflict among elected members between pro-European and Euro-skeptic factions. The latter is in charge now, and has the power to purge its opponents. In contrast, the Republican “purges” are being carried out by the very same people who held power in 2015. There is no reason to think they changed their minds on anything. The only difference between then and now is that Trump is President, and he’s done nothing to promote his ideological allies into positions of power. From what I can see, the purges are not about ideology so much as open opposition to Trump. In the Republican Party of today, you can promote all that libertarian stuff, you just can’t notice that Trump doesn’t believe it. The dominant idea of today’s Republican Party is not nationalism, it’s the Donald Trump Master Deal-Maker personality cult. Most of the actual nationalists who supported him in 2015 don’t much like him now. I can’t think of any falsifiable prediction to make, but my sense is that after Trump the “nationalistic posture” of the GOP will completely evaporate and it will try to go back to its old free market/religious/hawkish coalition.
The part that you’re missing here is that the Republicans have been playing a very stupid game on immigration and trade for a long time. In some ways analogous to the Torys and their tactical use of euroskepticism while actually being comfortable with the EU status quo.
When it’s time to fundraise or get voters out to the polls, they talk about cracking down on illegal immigration and anti-competitive policies of our trade partners. But as soon as they get into office, they decide that we need amnesty and offshoring. Then the base recoils and they reluctantly stop pushing the exact opposite policies that they were elected for.
Trump won, and is able to threaten Republican congressmen, because he is willing to actually walk the walk. Right now there’s a mile of wall being built every day and the trade war with China is ongoing. It’s not perfect, he could be doing a lot better, but no other Republican was even prepared to try before now.
Source please. Last I heard they were still just replacing existing fencing and kept running into legal issues.
@Aftagley
Source as of late September. I haven’t seen anything that suggests a slowdown since.
Less than one month earlier:
I might be wrong here but I don’t think that that’s contradictory.
My understanding is that Wall construction was stalled / barely progressing until very recently, when the pace has finally picked up. The CBP estimate of 450 miles by the end of the year is very ambitious and I don’t expect that much to be built, but as far as I can tell from my previous link and the BBC a mile of new wall per day from August or September looks about right.
Obviously that’s still too slow but it’s still infinitely more wall than Jeb or Hillary would have built.
@Nabil ad Dajjal:
Where is your citation that any of the “wall” that has been built is not simply replacement fencing of already existing barriers?
And, if there is any new, how much of it is new?
I finally found a decent source.
They go into more detail about the exact length of each segment in the spreadsheet, but on the map the color-coding does a good job of visualizing progress. Green indicates new construction, with solid green being new wall and a green outline being replacements for pre-existing fences or vehicle barriers. There’s a tiny bit of solid green, all in Texas.
It looks like you’re right, there’s been ~1.5 miles of new wall built of which 1/3rd was built by Trump supporters on private property. The rest of the 125 miles that have been built are replacement wall or new walls on levees.
It’s disappointing, and frankly I’m surprised that this isn’t getting more play in the press. I had a hell of a time finding real figures on how much wall had been built and where in the news. It was mostly complaining about cactuses.
Thank you for going back and finding that source; I’d never seen the topic broken down in such detail before (and likely would have eye-rolled right on past a website with the .construction domain).
I’ve heard it talked about a few times, but never in this level of detail.
We’ve all been there.
Ok, somewhere a comment was eaten. Shorter repeat.
I’ve consistently seen it reported that Trump a) claims to be building new wall, and b) actually has only been able to replace or change existing barriers.
I don’t know why you think this hasn’t been reported.
@HeelBearCub,
I’ve seen a handful of articles making claims along those lines, none of which cited sources or had any kind of up-to-date breakdown. It was all very vague and hand-wavey.
I’m not just going to take their word for it, especially not when they have so much reason to lie.
HBC,
Why does replacing a vehicle barrier with a pedestrian barrier not count as “real”? See the image in the article you linked of a 4 foot jungle gym being replaced by a 10 foot fence with barbed wire.
@Dpuglas Knight:
I don’t think I’ve used the word “real”.
What I’ve said is that he isn’t building new wall sections, just refurbishing existing sections or making them higher. Most of the work to establish that a barrier can exist in those places was already done. Trump hasn’t (yet, I guess) done the work to enable ~2000 miles of pedestrian barrier to be built.
If you look at that website Nabil linked, you can see that current plans on that map only add up to ~250 miles.
From the perspective of the pro-Trump media: they’ve calculated that “He’s building the Wall” is a better message for getting Trump re-elected than “The leftists are stopping us from building the Wall”. From the perspective of everyone else: the Trump administration’s failures are less important than all of the terrible things he’s succeeding at.
I suspect this is the best explanation. Pro Trump media want to talk about how he’s building the wall (yay!) or how the Democrats are obstructing him building the wall (boo!). Anti Trump media want to talk about how he’s building the wall (boo!) and how the Democrats are obstructing him building the wall (yay!).
No partisan source (which is most political reporting) has any particular incentive to report that he’s actually not building much new wall, not so much because of effective opposition by Democrats or liberal judges or whatever, but rather because he’s ineffectual and easily distracted and unfamiliar with the levers of power in his office.
This story also doesn’t manage to work as clickbait or outrage fuel for very many people. And it doesn’t tell a story that a lot of people want to hear. So there are still news sources that will tell it to you, because they think their job is honestly reporting what’s happening. But most news sources aren’t going to cover it, or cover it much.
Again, I’ve seen these facts reported repeatedly. Trump is trying to come up with ways to build the wall, including declaring an “emergency”. Trump has not yet been successful in doing more than replacing existing barrier.
These reports came to me. I didn’t have to go hunt them out. Follow a moderately active political blogger and you will see many reports of these items.
This is not the cynical outrage of the day you are looking for …
@Nabil ad Dajjal
That is a really interesting site. Thanks for posting it.
@Douglas Knight
It’s hard to say if any particular instance of this replacement is “real” or not without knowing the terrain and the threat for a particular section. As I always hammer on, the wall won’t stop people, the wall enables the Border Patrol to stop people. I use a bank vault as a simile: even the best, well made door can be breached with enough time. However, if the time it takes is more than the time until your guard returns on his rounds then you successfully stop the intruder. But, crucially, the bank vault is just making the guard force more efficient. Instead of needing a guy to sit there 24/7 at each vault, you can have one guard watch all of them.
This is how all types of obstacles work: by increasing the efficiency of your security forces. Similarly, if you have a great sensor system that can detect every border-jumper and even count their freckles, it’s worthless without people that can respond. If it detects a border-jumper and it takes 4 hours for the Border Patrol to get to them, but it only takes two hours for the intruder to disappear into the nearest town, then the sensor system is better run by the Census Bureau than the Border Patrol because all you’re doing is counting population increases. You need to consider all of your obstacles (both natural and reinforcing) as part of a system, and even the most impressive-looking might not add value if you don’t do this.
So the question for this replacement in the picture is “Were breaches by pedestrians without vehicles a major issue at this location?” If this location is in a remote desert area where it is dangerous to cross without a vehicle because you’ll probably die without the mobility and water-carrying capacity from a vehicle, then the vehicle barrier is probably just fine at stopping people from crossing. I don’t know for this particular segment. If the CBP has been trying to get that built for a while, then it probably adds value. If it was upgraded just for the sake of upgrading by decree from Washington without due consideration from local forces, then probably not. I’d hope they’re starting in areas with already-identified problems and a plan for making use of the new obstacles.
CatCube, OK, if no construction can be assessed as real, then upgrades don’t count, but that’s very different from saying that fresh construction is more real than upgrades.
A mile of fencing is being replaced, by newer taller fencing, probably.
I’m skeptical that much if any of the constructed barrier at this point is de novo.
I think Nabil ad Dajjal’s post has a lot to recommend it. I also, however, think that Libertarians are removing themselves more than they are being purged.
I frequent Reason.com, and in particular the Volokh Conspiracy sub-portion. Reason libertarians, which I think track fairly well with the ones “leaving” the GOP, have 1 primary reason for leaving: They are pro-immigration, and its their #1 issue, by far, like if you made a pie chart of all their issues it would look kinda like this. The thing is, no one else knew this prior to 2015. I think most people thought there was a small stoner contingent that was basically drug, libertarians, and a big fiscal libertarian segment. Why else would they have been in the GOP?
So I think I understand now why they are leaving, based on revealed preferences, but I don’t know why they ever were in the GOP, when fiscal issues have been revealed as almost irrelevant to them.
A few threads ago, in a discussion about why people of all political stripes feel like they’re losing, someone suggested that people re-sort their priorities to emphasize whatever area the feel like they’re losing on. Your priorities are just a list of where you feel the most threatened. It may be that no one knew immigration was Reason-libertarians’ #1 issue prior to 2015 because it wasn’t their #1 issue prior to 2015, they didn’t feel threatened on it. Fiscal issues are irrelevant to them now because they’re satisfied with the state of things (or not — I just read a Reason article yesterday complaining about growing federal debt & deficits).
Agreed that it looks more like libertarians are removing themselves from the GOP than an active purge though. On the other hand, my libertarian irl-friend is still very satisfied with Trump.
ETA: Is there any data on self-described libertarians, their priorities, and their factions? There seems to me to be a split between the libertarians I’ve known in real life, who are basically standard Republican voters who don’t go to church, and the libertarians at Reason, who encourage more immigration and are broadly critical of Trump.
I don’t think many libertarians are “satisfied with the state of things” fiscally, but that’s also not a change from any time in the past many many years, so it has probably moved to background noise in many cases. Like the one recent Reason article you found, you can find the diehards still banging the drum about it but they probably feel like they’re pushing the stone up the hill*. For people who care about immigration, that’s something that is changing now and could conceivably change in better or worse ways in the near future, so it starts sucking up the energy.
* Mixing some metaphors there. I feel like Zapp Brannigan.
Speaking as a libertarian, the two Trump high priority policies that I see as going in precisely the wrong direction are immigration and trade. I don’t read Reason regularly enough to be sure of their position, but my guess is that a lot of libertarians would agree.
They’ve been trying to go back for awhile but they have the little problem that there simply isn’t a voting base for ‘old free market/religious/hawkish’ — a donor base maybe.
This. The problem is that there’s a growing anxiety on the right half of the spectrum that immigration trends will create a permanent left wing ethnic coalition and otherwise alter Western culture and politics in ways they don’t like, and that anxiety is only going to increase the more the demographics shift, unless you have some ideological think tanks do enough work to convince average right wingers otherwise.
I think the nationalist wave among US conservatives will survive Trump because Trump himself is only a product of a trend that is nearly universal across the Western world, in which the right parties are becoming more nationalism oriented. The shock of 2015 is still rippling through politics.
This. The nationalist position varies from country to country, but it is everywhere a rejection of the “open borders,” “free trade” position that is the default of the US Democrats, the “secret” policy of the US NeverTrump Republicans, and the apparent position of the “elites” of the UK, France and Germany.
Until relatively recently (a decade or so ago), only a fringe supported open borders. The normal liberal position was that legal immigration is a good thing if there isn’t too much of it, with the additional qualifiers that illegal immigration is a bad thing, and immigrants who don’t assimilate into the culture of the country were bad.
I have yet to hear a principled defense of open borders and non-assimilation.
Free trade, yes, but I’m pretty sure open borders has never been the default or even “secret” policy of most mainstream Democrats and/or “NeverTrump” Republicans in the United States. I think you are confusing a desire for more legal immigration, with a desire for unrestricted legal immigration.
The Democratic party might, in its race to be always one step left of the Republicans on the subject, wind up in a place of utterly ineffectual restrictions on immigration. But to say that represents an open-borders policy is like saying that e.g. Herbert Hoover had a great-depression policy.
@John Schilling
Repeated and aggressive amnesties are close to the same thing in practice.
But practice is not the same thing as policy. Also, I’d dispute the “repeated and aggressive” part; 1986 was over thirty years ago and what’s been done since has been edge cases, no “legalize them all”.
@John Schilling
Sure, because they’d get politically murdered back home if they did it.
The attempts have been repeated and aggressive.
How about open borders and voluntary assimilation? That was the de facto U.S. policy for the first hundred and fifty years, aside from some restrictions in the final fifty years on Chinese immigration.
And even the restrictions that came in in the nineteen-twenties didn’t apply then to New World immigrants, who are the bulk of the present would-be immigrants.
OK, but a few posts ago you were talking about “in practice”, and now you’re talking about failed attempts which mean the thing attempted wasn’t actually practiced.
“We should have an amnesty and then close the border”, is not at all the same as “we should have open borders”. You may believe that this proposal would if implemented fail in a way that approximates open borders, and I would be sympathetic to that belief.
But from there to claiming that both the Democrats and the non-Trump Republicans are all secretly planning a failed implementation of this proposal as part of their alleged secret open-borders agenda, requires more support than just the observation that they keep trying to do a thing that could fail in an open-bordered way.
@John Schilling
Fair.
What I should have said (and meant) was that in practice repeated and aggressive amnesties WOULD be the same thing.
Whenever the number of illegals gets to a critical number, elites try to amnesty some to all of those illegals.
The fact that the mass of people defeated them in every attempt so far is a sign this is not a popular position.
The fact that the elites keep floating it is a sign that the elites are in favor of this.
Witness the fact that no elites pre-Trump were floating the substantially more popular position that we should dramatically cut immigration.
David:
How would we square open borders with anything like our current welfare state? If you assume that part of the point of a welfare state is to avoid having pits of dire poverty in your country[1], then allowing a huge number of poor people in who aren’t eligible for welfare for a decade probably means importing a lot of poverty. Assuming everyone who immigrates and stays will eventually become eligible for those programs (which I think is almost inevitable), it’s not clear that an illiterate campesino who comes here to do yard work is *ever* going to be productive enough to cover the cost of the government programs he will eventually consume.
[1] We’ll just ignore those homeless encampments for now.
Fair question. My proposal, made a very long time ago, is that new immigrants should not get welfare, or the vote, for some reasonably extended period of time.
Yes. I cannot see why having a bunch of people in our country who are poor by our standards is worse than having the same people outside of our country and much poorer.
Think about the implications of the claim that it is better to have people starving to death where you cannot see them than merely hungry where you can.
@JohnShilling — This doesn’t directly address what you’ve said necessarily, but…
The meme surrounding mainstream republicans is that they support amnesty today in exchange for promises of future immigration control reforms which can easily be reneged upon. To a republican restrictionist voter this is either the product of stupidity or duplicity. Another meme would be that employer business interests are disproportionately influential in the GOP and in the short term benefit from Visas [and visa overstays].
The idea that the GOP doesn’t support border security for reasons of fiscal conservatism or respect for personal privacy is also heavily suspect given how easily they’ll support deepening the deficit for the sake of tax cuts or a foreign intervention. Paul Ryan came across as adamant
The term frequently used to describe the status quo by its critics is ‘open borders’, but whether or not the word properly describes the phenomenon is largely irrelevant *if* it is agreed that 1. The status quo has been and will be sufficient to affect dramatic demographic, cultural, and economic change. 2. Almost the entire democrat and a fair proportion of the republican party are adamant about keeping Trump from doing something to alter the state of affairs.
@DavidFriedman
My understanding of US immigration policy is:
1. The US restricted citizenship to free white men of good moral character, then extended that to freedmen and their descendants.
2. Quantitative restrictions did not exist until the 20s, but even in the absence of legal limits, immigration-in-mass itself did not occur until after the civil war, and the 1920 immigration restriction was partially a result of the cultural shock that said immigrant wave produced. I think it is reasonable to assume that the national origins quota overlooked south and central America out of the drafters assumption that immigration wasn’t coming and would not come from that direction at the time rather than a desire to shun south and eastern europeans in favor of more immigrants from south and central america.
3. Describing assimilation as voluntary would only have been true in the thin libertarian sense which looks solely at laws . Assimilation is more voluntary today in the thick libertarian sense that legal and social attitudes [in certain parts of the united states at least] actively protect immigrants from any social expectation to assimilate.
The case where open borders succeeds [or fails to fail] seems to hinge on assumptions some of which were true in the past in the united states and virtually none of which are true today. (In particular, everyone carries their own weight, no affect of immigration on the legal and regulatory regime, negative externalizes if not negligible are appropriately priced, business opportunities are easy to get off the ground)
A thing that kinda clashes with the idea that we are being more and more subjected to a policy that goes toward the endpoint of open borders is that I’ve heard from people who travel a lot internationally and have done it for a long period of time that legally passing international borders, even as a tourist or for a business trip, even between western countries, has become increasingly more difficult over the last 30 years.
Yes, and the meme surrounding non-mainstream Republicans is that they are all microcephalic racist literal Nazis. Stipulated that there’s lots of memes saying the outgroup is stupid venal people who can’t be trusted, for every possible outgroup. Have you got anything more substantial than memes here?
Because the reality is, thirty-three years ago when nobody had tried it before, mainstream Republicans said “OK, this looks like it is worth a try”.
And got burned by it, and ever since have shot down every proposal for a broad amnesty first and border controls later. They have from time to time allowed narrowly-tailored amnesties like DACA, but anyone using that plus 1986 as an excuse to say “all you RINOs are secret open-borders advocates” basically just deserve the eyes rolled, moving on, treatment.
And instead get the microcephalic racist literal Nazi treatment, because it’s all about the memes. Knock it off with the memes already.
Conditions have changed. We have a welfare state now, and the immigrants would be likely even _less_ libertarian than the current US electorate. And the cultural pressure is for the locals to accommodate to the newcomers, rather than vice-versa, as exemplified by the horrified reaction to the late Joey Vento’s English-only cheesesteak joint.
Now open borders just means more people to make my home foreign to me and vote money from my pocket to support themselves
It doesn’t matter if there’s a deal not to provide welfare or citizenship; that deal will be altered as soon as the side which benefits from altering it gets temporary power, which will occur no later than the children of the immigrants getting the vote (and likely much sooner)
This cannot be true. I just went to Europe and back, and the customs checks were virtually nonexistent on both sides. Into Europe an Italian lady asked me if I was carrying any prohibited goods, I said no and got stamped through. Then you get no checks at all moving through countries. Coming back you filled out an e-form and get stamped through basically on your own honesty.
They do subject some out of the EU flights to more checks than others.
So if you came to the EU from the US, you probably won’t be checked much. But if you travel a suspicious route, you’re much more likely to be checked.
People travelling known trafficking and contraband routes get a lot more checks than others.
And ubiquitous X-rays afford a lot more unobstrusive checks than what may have been possible in the past. They also have all those kits that do checks for chemicals really fast. The explosives check is just swiping the inside of your baggage, and it’s fast.
But that has nothing to do with borders. I have to do that if I fly from Chicago to Atlanta. That’s simply airline security, which is in a post 9/11 world, but had been stepping up in vigor even before that.
@The Nybbler says: “…open borders just means more people to make my home foreign to me and vote money from my pocket to support themselves…”
While immigrant voters and their children (but not their grandchildren) are indeed more likely than most other voters to support the Democratic Party which is more pro taxation and redistribution than the Republicans are, the demographic within Democrats that’s most supportive of increased redistribution and taxation are Democrats who earn between $80,000 and $200,000 a year (unlike Republicans who tend to be more supportive of redistribution when they earn less than $40,000 a year).
So maybe if you really want less support for folks voting “money from my pocket”, instead of limiting foreign immigration, you should discourage folks from getting college diplomas and moving to cities.
Why shouldn’t I embrace the power of “both”?
Sounds like Scott’s “anyone buy the outgroup”. Immigrants and 80k+ Democrats aren’t natural allies, but they become so to fight the outgroup of 80k+ Dems.
The main problem I see is that is preventing American nationalism from having the successes of European nationalistic movements is that American politicians who take a “nationalistic” stance are still wedded to conservative economic policies and support for the MIC, at a time when big corporations and the MIC are taking a vocal globalist stance.
In the UK it’s not a purge of the faction per se – it’s a requirement that MPs toe the line on a central policy. People are leaving voluntarily or kicked out because they refused to support Boris Johnson on an issue he presented as a confidence issue. There are europhile Tories who whether for cynical or sincere reasons are toeing the line and are I think at no real risk
Agreed, and in fact the libertarian faction within the Tory party is overwhelmingly extremely Eurosceptic and happier with the current leadership than with any for many years. It’s centrist corporatist mildly authoritarian types who are leaving, for the most part (along with a few hard-to-categorise principled eccentrics like Rory Stewart).
Isn’t the party of libertarians in the UK the Lib-Dems?
Historically, yes. (and the were just the Liberals or Whigs)
Nowadays, where do they even stand? (beyond brown-nosing Cameron then becoming the remain party.)
The Lib Dems were formed by a fusion of the Social Democratic Party, a progressive party formed from ex-Labour members uncomfortable with Labour’s leftward shift in the 80s, and the old Liberal Party, a party that started out as what we would call classically liberal, but made the transformation to social liberalism at the end of the 19th Century. The Liberal Party was supplanted by Labour as the main opposition to the Tories after WWI.
Today, they’d best be described as a culturally progressive party that does the same genuflections left wing parties do, but sticks to the center on economic issues, or whatever is convenient at the time. They’re certainly not libertarians, although there may be some in the party.
Their defining trait today is having a more clear cut anti-Brexit position than Labour who have either a nuanced or muddled position depending on your interpretation.
Here, Russell adopts an odd convention to resolve an apparent contradiction in a fallacious proof schema. I posit that
(All x are y) /\ (All x are z) ==> (Some y are z)
is simply invalid reasoning. The simple way to repair it, though, is simply to require a third premise:
(All x are y) /\ (All x are z) /\ (Some x exist) ==> (Some y are z)
Trying to bake (Some x exist) into statements of the form (All x are y) makes vacuously true statements like “All golden mountains are golden” impossible to express. I think the examples can be corrected as follows:
“All Greeks are men, all Greeks are white, some Greeks exist, therefore some men are white.”
“All golden mountains are mountains, all golden mountains are golden, therefore if golden mountains exist, some mountains are golden”
Inspired by the (as-I-type) 11 cent bid for HRC on predictit’s 2020 dem nomination market, what is your dream candidate and match-up for 2020 POTUS and why?
I’d like this to stay in the realm of realistic fiction, so please limit yourself to candidates who are currently (1) alive humans satisfying the Constitutional qualifications, (2) have previously held at least medium-high elected office (flexible here, but I’m thinking mayor of a large city, governor of a state, HR rep or Senator).
Because this is fantasy fulfillment where we dream of a better world than we have, I’d like to avoid conflict and ask that y’all refrain from criticizing other people’s choices.
Ben Sasse would be nice
+1
Can I ask why Sasse? This isn’t meant as any kind of criticism: I’m just curious.
I’m generally frustrated with the republican party’s inability to stand up to Trump. I feel like we spent 8 years with Obama screaming about how rule of law matters, and the deficit matters, and executive overreach matters… but now that “our guy” is in office the republicans are cowed and flaccid. Sasse seems like one of the very few people willing to call a dumpster fire a dumpster fire.
I like and respect that.
@souleater
+1
Ever since Trump looked like a serious nominee, I’ve referred to him as the “Republican Clinton” (either one).
Thank you very much.
“Thank you very much.”
Yes, it’s nice being able to argue about policy instead of ground rules.
My favorite matchup would be an anti-immigration Democrat like early 2000s Bernie Sanders against an anti-immigration Republican like Tom Cotton because of the Overton window move it would create.
I don’t know if any current Democrats are like that. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard?
+1 on Tulsi. I can’t get behind the minimum wage and single payer stuff but if I had to choose someone in the actual running, her views are less terrible than most
and I wouldn’t mind having to look at her face in my news feed for 4-8 years…-1 on Tulsi. Her weird views on Syria and the closeness she has with Russia seem disqualifying to me.
I really like Tulsi’s anti-war views, I really don’t like Tulsi’s Assad-friendly views.
@Nick: Tulsi Gabbard’s comfort with Assad seems to stem from having fought Islamic fundamentalism as a US servicewoman. Yes, Assad is a bad man, but her views seem to show a maturity lacking in many of the Democratic Presidential candidates.
It would be a positive thing to have a veteran Commander-in-Chief again, though not really worth thinking about given how she’s not going to win.
I don’t know; I’d believe her if she was able to consistently keep the message of “He’s the best of our bad options.”
The fact that she doesn’t, she’s tried to cast doubt on the chemical weapons attacks and generally serves as an apologist to his extreme actions are just weird. That combined with RT/Sputnik/Russia’s massive support of her just make me too skeptical to ever trust her.
I wonder if Tulsi could make the case that there is a war between 2 factions in the middle east… we’re backing Saudi Arabia & friends.
But there isn’t a really good reason to align ourselves with the Saudis over the Iranians… except that the Iranians don’t like us.
Although I imagine that probably has something to do with the fact that were allied to all their enemies.
I can easily imagine an alternate reality where we’re allied with Iran and Syria and the Saudis are rushing through sanctions to acquire Nuclear weapons.
@Aftagley:
Hrm, that’s fair.
Assad is a brutal dictator. But the remaining armed opposition to him consists of al-Qaeda and various proxies (often themselves very Islamist) for Turkish expansionism. The liberals are dead or in exile, the SDF isn’t at war with Assad and has a way bigger problem to its north. It’s hard to see what harm being pro-Assad would do at this point, he’s the least bad option left.
Isn’t condition (2) an unnecessary limitation for two reasons:
a. The current President shows it is not a requirement to become President. If this is seen as a requirement in real terms it might explain some of Trump’s success even.
b. There are probably lots of potentially-good fantasy presidents amongst non-office-holding Democrats and Democrat-adjacent figures, perhaps especially in business, who might honestly be preferable to any elected politician. It seems odd to exclude them on a purely credentialist basis.
Sure. Who’s your pick, then?
I keep hoping for a Herman Cain comeback.
For entertainment value, Mike Gravel vs. Sarah Palin. Two weird outsider Alaskans who’d bring all sorts of ideas into the mainstream conversation. Mostly not good ideas but still. And it’s almost realistic.
For Presidents who would address existential risk and not break things, allowing my level of background anxiety to decrease, Cory Booker vs. Charlie Baker. Bonus points if their VP picks also have the same initials.
For actual substantive debate, Elizabeth Warren vs. Paul Ryan–their personal brands demand it.
I like Booker more than most of the field, and I wouldn’t have guessed that his campaign would so completely fail to gain traction. At the very least as Biden shed support I thought he’d get some of it.
I wish Jay Inslee had done better in the primary.
I remember Inslee from when I was a child living in WA, so it feels like a strange form of deja vu to hear his name again after decades away.
@jgr314 says:
For the Democratic nominee I’ve heard good things about Sherrod Brown so I’ll go with him, for the Republican U’ll go with Rand Paul as I at least have some idea on what he stands for.
I don’t think you are actually all that familiar with Rand Paul…
@HeelBearCub,
True enough, I’m just more ignorant of the other Republicans.
Rand Paul inherited a lot of his dad’s following, who were mostly the libertarian fringe of the Republican party. He’s more libertarian than the average Republican, but seems to have lost a lot of his independent streak over the last few years and become more generic Republican.
Along with this, is the necessary following issue that where Rand Paul actually “stands” and what the average political consumer thinks of where he stands or more divergent than for the generic Republican.
So when Plumber says he would prefer Rand Paul because he know what he stands for, but doesn’t for other Republicans …
I’m ignoring condition 2 (after all, Trump did not meet it) and going for sheer amusement value. Assuming the 2020 GOP candidate is Trump, I’d like Kanye West for the opposing candidate.
We might get a terrible President, but the campaign would be amazing.
Would Kanye be the true “let’s burn it all down” candidate, or is there someone more extraordinary we could draft?
In any case, I assume his running mate would be Charlie Sheen, no?
I’m not going for “burn it all down”–I’m going for “apparently we’re living in a reality TV show, where who we elect makes no difference to policy whatsoever*, so let’s have plenty of spectacle.”
*See Obamacare passage and non-repeal, Proposition 8, Proposition 187, and so forth for examples.
Antonio Brown.
And sure, he can run with Charlie Sheen, but I think we can do better than Trump for the Republicans.
Axl Rose?
It’s a shame Mel Gibson isn’t eligible to be his running mate. Hmm. Ted Nugent?
I remain satisfied with my previous answer.
Mitt is a old tired soul, but he knows he can’t turn his back on the country he loves. With head held high, Willard Mitt Romney comes out of retirement and makes his second bid for president. His traditional conservative profile and calm demeanor proves an effective counterweight to the Trump’s debauchery and chaos, and he stuns the nation by narrowly clinching the Republican primary.
But if Romney is the sleeping giant, Hilary Clinton is the rising phoenix. Facing the shame of her 2016 defeat and the scorn of her own party, Clinton privately retreats into her foundation’s charity work. She proves an admirably effective administrator while doing personal street-level work, and she finds solace in elevating the disenfranchised and repairing broken lives; by late 2019, the Clinton Foundation is universally praised throughout inner-city America, a beacon of hope in a rough environment. With renewed purpose and first-hand understanding of the importance of progressive values, along with vehement disavowment of her prior Wall Street friends, Clinton smashes the Democratic primary and hits the road to universal Democratic fanfare.
Will Romney’s conservative values or Clinton’s newfound progressive focus win out? The fate of America shall be decided in:
Election 2020: Loser’s Bracket
You have described a fresh hell.
Worse than the current one? Really?
Surely you meant to say John Ellis “Jeb” Bush…
Before he runs for president, he must go on an epic quest to recapture his exclamation point.
Is his exclamation point the Sword of Chang?
This will now be my description of the delayed script of National Treasure 3.
All this nonsense disappeared with the development of mathematical logic. The Aristotelian “all P are Q” means, in modern notation:
(exists x, P(x)) /\ forall x, P(x) -> Q(x)
but if Socrates is a known object you could simply apply the predicate directly: IsMortal(Socrates), and that seems to be the point Russell is making.
If you don’t have Socrates as a constant and only have a Socrates-detecting predicate, then yes, you’d need to write ugly things like:
(exists x, IsSocrates(x)) /\ forall x, IsSocrates(x) -> IsMortal(x).
But Russell has fixed this problem with his iota operator. Russell’s iota allows you to convert a predicate to an object once you have proven that there exists one and only one object satisfying the predicate. So if you have a proof of:
(exists x, IsSocrates(x)) /\ forall x y, IsSocrates(x) /\ IsSocrates(y) -> x = y
then you may define Socrates to be iota(IsSocrates) and just write IsMortal(Socrates).
The reason it’s legitimate is that there is a proof translation from logic with iota into logic without iota. For any valid proof that uses Socrates as a constant you can obtain a valid proof in terms of IsSocrates().
This is the correct explanation. (For some reason, I had thought math-style logical notation predated Russell, so I was a bit thrown by why he was choosing to write in this way, but now it makes more sense.)
This is a case of everyday interpretations of sentences conflicting with their more mathematical interpretations (similar to how “if it’s raining, I’ll bring an umbrella” is interpreted as an “if and only if” instead of the logical one-way if). In logic, it’s quite natural to have statements which are vacuously true: “all purple dogs speak French” is logically true, and mundanely unbelievable. This becomes important if we’re not sure of the entire extent of a set. What if we happen upon a purple dog next Friday? Quoi alors?
Russell wisely dodges the question of whether there might be unknown instances of a set and instead focuses on the truth and validity of the statements as made. In the process, he distinguishes strict logical interpretations from everyday ones.
Come to think of it, I think the logic definition of “interpretation” (an assignment of meanings to symbols in a formal language) may have postdated Russell as well.
I was overly vague with “all this nonsense disappeared” comment. Principia Mathematica started publication in 1910 but Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy” quoted by the OP is from 1945. So there is indeed a question of why Russell chose to write this way. I guess he wrote for philosophers who would run away at the first sight of a formula.
Before mathematical logic, the way to express forall x, P(x) -> Q(x) was to say “no P are non-Q”. So you could say “no purple dogs are unable to speak French” if you needed to.
Isn’t the whole point of Russell’s passage to say that it means something else?
Um… no?
What do you imply Russell says it means?
@Douglas Knight
That’s what the left conjunct (exists x, P(x)) is for. If you think my formula is incorrect, please provide a correct one.
You are invited to make a small change to the popular culture of your nation or region. By small change, I mean something on the order of swapping American football for soccer, country music for hiphop, or tabletop war games for MMO RPGs.
What do you have in mind?
I’d make alcohol less popular of a drink, and have something else fill its void. The Chinese love their tea, which was one thing, but seeing middle-aged men watching football sip juice over in Portugal was just surreal to me.
I’m not sure that’s a small change, at least in effect, but I sure endorse it.
Good answer; I wouldn’t have thought of that. I’m having a tough time imagining a small change to a culture with larger positive effect.
Sodas replaced with sugar-free sodas.
Some candidates:
– replace checkers with go as a widely known board game
– change the way we count to follow a strict place-value format (e.g., no special number names like “twelve” or “twenty” and instead use either “one-two”/”two-zero” or “ten-two”/”two-ten”)
– replace English (a language with more exceptions than rule-following words) with Spanish (almost entirely rule-following). Obviously, this is more major.
– replace sitcoms with improv as the mass-popular form of comedy (I expect this to be the most controversial of my proposals).
This is really overselling Spanish.
Indeed. German would be better on thus basis. Or esperanto I suppose.
???
German is possibly the least regular language in Europe. The majority of verbs are irregular (hilariously called “strong”).
Lojban
I bought the lojban book (don’t have it anymore, left it with my parents when I finally moved out).
@Enkidum
because they undergo a ‘strong’ change.
For teachers of advanced, gifted and nerdy students only: let them study this — weak verbs made strong.
German has this chaining of substantives, where the last word determines what you’re talking about. When you have a good working memory that’s quite practical.
True but with the caveat that in some Spanish dialects, people essentially ignore the irregular conjugations and substitute them with improper “regular” versions and everything works smoothly. I haven’t really thought about how that would work in English, but I think it would sound very strange.
I had in mind the reading transformation {written} -> {spoken}
Some Spanish exceptions are noted here: Phonetic exceptions.
The reverse transformation {spoke} -> {written} is also strong, though that link discusses complications as well.
I would also endorse German from this perspective. I’m sure there are other languages that are good in this regard.
My usual recommendation when this topic comes up is Malay/Indonesian. Very easy pronunciation (simpler than either Italian or Spanish), very transparent spelling in the Latin alphabet (again, more so than even Italian or Spanish), no gender, no nominal declension, no conjugation by tense or person, and large segments of the vocabulary will already be familiar to westerners (loans from Dutch, Portuguese and English, and through them Greek and Latin), middle-easterners (loans from Persian and Arabic), south asians (loans from Sanskrit and various other Indian languages) and east asians (loans from multiple varieties of Chinese).
*laughs in Ancient Greek*
Seriously, though, I don’t think English grammar is that exception-laden. At any rate, all the non-native-speakers I’ve asked have said that the biggest difficulty is the wide variety of prepositional phrases (put up, put down, put on, put off; shut up, shut down; etc.), most of which don’t really make sense unless you already know what they mean.
I marveled when we encountered our first completely regular Greek verb. I think it was our only one in that textbook, too….
Ah, so you’ve attended an Aristophanes play!
“change the way we count to follow a strict place-value format (e.g., no special number names like “twelve” or “twenty” and instead use either “one-two”/”two-zero” or “ten-two”/”two-ten”)”
Welsh does this. Twelve is ‘un deg dau’, literally ‘one ten two’, 22 is ‘dau deg dau’ (pronounced ‘die deg die’) lit. ‘two tens two’, 34 is ‘tri deg pedwar’ (‘three tens four’), etc.
I’m torn. The prospect of replacing American Football with Rugby Union is a good one: it still satisfies the need for a violent sport, but the injuries in Rugby seem less severe than in Gridiron Football. There have been many changes in American Football since it definitively split from other codes of football in the 1880s. I view most of these as having been good, but also chasing a local optimum at the expense of a global one.
But what really takes the cake for small pop-culture change with an outsized positive impact is to remove the PG-13 rating from the MPAA classification scheme. I believe that the existence of PG-13 has worsened both kid movies and non-kid movies. Because it’s possible (and more profitable to) make a blockbuster move that appeals to adult sensibilities but makes the PG-13 grade, it’s a requirement. This means that movies that set out to address the totality of adult existence aren’t ever really designed to appeal to a broad audience.
So if I get extra points for it being a small change, I’m going with the PG-13 thing.
This is a good one, but don’t forget to also add Cricket as a national sport (don’t replace baseball, just get both).
Cricket’s wonderful pace means that Americans will have plenty to discuss.
This is a magnificent change and I wish I’d thought of it.
I thing the PG-13 thing is a bad idea. Let’s use the most obvious blockbusters as an example, the Marvel movies. Do you predict that after this change more would be made R or more would be PG? Disney wants as broad of an audience as possible, and especially likes families with children. I predict Disney would make every future Marvel movie PG at the expense of adult themes. They can already look at the success of Into the Spiderverse, which was an amazing movie, and make all future Marvel movies PG.
I suppose superhero competitors like DC would lean more into the R rating to differentiate themselves, but they are already doing that with Joker.
Is this the change you wanted?
Kinda? Anything that breaks the increasing homogenization of pop culture. Everything is trying to be everything to everyone.
@aristides says:
I thought the first Spiderman movie and the bits of the second one I saw (it had Dr. Octopus in it) were okay, and the X-Men scene of a child Magneo bending the bars of the gates of a concentration camp to get to his mother was brilliant, the rest of the Marvel films that I saw bits of were forgettable.
The last film that I saw in the theatre was Cars 2 which my son loved, so I’d like more like that, of memorable films released this last decade that impressed ne there’s: ’71, Locke, and 20th century women.
More films for kids and grown-ups instead of the deluge of teen/young adult movies seems a fine idea to me.
Make dressing up smartly be seen as a good thing. People nowadays are too scruffy.
Also, not entirely unrelated, have architects embrace the value of making buildings that are actually nice to look at. (Not sure that strictly counts as “popular” culture, but it would certainly affect a lot of people’s lives for the better.)
Also, just for fun, make epic poetry a popular literary genre once again.
THIS
Fine but for my change I’m making t-shirts and hoodies considered formal attire
For my change I’m making all hoodies the jacket-style kind with a zipper.
For my change I’m making all hoodies hooded tuxedo jackets: two buttons instead of a zipper, and they have silk grosgrain lapels.
I desire to purchase one of these. That sounds amazing. It’ll be a great addition to my assassin cosplay.
Require every architect to live for a year in a building they designed (on their own money, of course).
Get rid of cultural awards (e.g., Oscars, Emmys, Hugos, Grammys, etc.; maybe even the Nobel Prizes). They increase conflict and dumb down artistic criticism.
I’ll oneup you and get rid on the entire notion of “art”. There is only craft.
Too many examples of master craftsmen who have really honed their techne, but have no gift, that don’t make good art. Lots of conscious/underground rappers are incredible lyricists and performers, without ever being interesting. Master Yngwie Malmsteen metal god guitarists make things with less soul than some 25 year old garage band guys. Amazing and capable directors who make innovative films that you’d never watch more than once. Most people’s favorite singer isn’t the one they think of as the technical best. etc
I’m not getting rid of people’s ability to like things over arbitrary, personal reasons. I’m just getting rid of the rationalization of that behavior.
@johan_larson says:
Raise the age in which one may drive, lower the drinking age or raise the voting age, have American political parties give out beer and/or whiskey again (like they did before prohibition) when new voters sign up, with a brass band and cheers for the new Democrats/Republicans/Federalists/Whigs/et cetera.
I love every part of this plan.
I’m going to commit Canadian sacrilege and replace our national sport, hockey. Between protective equipment and ice time it’s just too darn expensive, and the NHL is just not willing to let enough franchises open in our major cities. So it must go.
Replacing it as a year-round team sport will be basketball. Those who want a winter sport can go cross-country skiing and those who want to get their fight on can do BJJ. Those who want it more hardcore than BJJ are welcome to take up jousting.
How do you get the horses to wear skis?
Bribe them with sugar cubes.
Have the elephants on skates make fun of them.
Why waste this opportunity to por que no los dos?
Pour quoi non les deux*
Switch the USA to the metric system.
And the Long Scale while we’re at it. It’ll be a milliard times better 🙂
I was going to propose to replace the name “negative” with “positive” for the electric charge of an electron.
However, upon further research, I’m less sure this is wise.
So now I propose replacing both “negative” and “positive” with “sourceward” and “carrywise”, as appropriate by context. Or maybe something freer of connotations, like “floydward” and “gongward”.
Please. Forward and backward bernstonish lading, or be damned as a prissy Frenchman.
From a chemistry sense it definitely is backwards, since the charges are referring to added or removed electrons on a molecular entity. It would definitely make sense for the (+) charge to denote added electrons and the (-) charge to denote electrons removed, rather than the other way around.
Kids play out doors with each other like we did growing up.
In this case, region might just mean “city block”, but still.
@Randy M,
I still see kids walking to and from school in the little suburb I moved to, but I don’t see the elaborate “hide and seek” and “tag” games where we’d climb neighborhood fences (and quickly climb out when there’s a dog!) like we had in the ’70’s, but I don’t think many adults saw what we were up to back then either.
Maybe it’s the difference between homes and apartments. But it was very common when I was young to play touch football, soccer, or even baseball on the streets. We tore up the front yard with action figure combat.
Now, I frequently walk along our sidewalks for exercise with my daughters and only occasionally see another child for more than a moment.
@Randy M
You’re right about that, I remember throwing “footballs” around on the street was very common, I still see that sometimes, but usually a Dad is with the kids which I don’t remember happening back then.
Replace base 10 with base 12. (Two extra characters for 11 and 12 will be created, so any griping about ease of calculation/place value won’t exist.)
this is my favorite answer.
I get base 8 or base 16, but what benefit do we get out of base 12? Is this just to help out the Polydactylys among us?
Because all numbers that could potentially be factors of 12 are (i.e. everything up to 12/2), except 5. Makes a lot of operations just kind of happen.
Not sure if you’re aware, but duodecimal already has symbols for 10 and 11.
The Pitman digits for ten and eleven look like an upside down two and a backwards three. They’re in Unicode, although unfortunately I can’t paste them here. As a practical alternative some people use X and E as replacements.
So the first twelve numbers would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, E, and 10.
Replace American football with ultimate Frisbee.
Make meditation and Brazilian jujitsu a standard/mandatory part of public school curriculum, beginning at 1st grade.
Make pre-assigned/pre-selected seats the default standard for movie theaters.
Outlaw tipping, under punishment of death. For the person giving the tip, the person receiving the tip, and the owner of the establishment where the tip was given.
Have subway stations and subway cars be the cleanest parts of any city rather than the opposite.
I know you don’t mean they’d be doing both at the same time, but I kinda like the mental image of 8 year olds trying to achieve inner peace while getting a pressure point manipulated.
I don’t know how you rewrite the rules for ultimate without having it turn into team golf.
I don’t think you’ve ever seen professional Ultimate before. It looks, sounds, and feels nothing like golf.
Also, there are already multiple varieties of “team golf”, be it tournaments with a Scramble format or the Ryder Cup.
Current professional level ultimate is played at levels way below professional football in the US.
Well certainly, but not after lvlln’s switch. Still not seeing the golf connection?
I’m not sure what you mean. Ultimate as it’s currently played doesn’t look anything like team golf, unless you mean that throwing the disc to your teammate who’s running into the end zone looks a lot like someone hitting a golf ball into a hole. But the more obvious close analogue would be a quarterback throwing a football at a wide receiver who’s running into the end zone (esp since most current semi-pro ultimate games take place on standard 100-yard American football fields).
Its not an analog to football because football has a hundred other things that allow that play to happen.
What do you mean by hundred other things? In ultimate, there are also many other things that allow the play to happen, such as the thrower stepping around his defender, the receiver making a cut with a good fake that allows him to gain separation from his defender, and their 5 other teammates (standard ultimate being 7 on 7) moving out of the way so that their defenders don’t interrupt the play. I don’t know how that compares to American football’s 11 on 11 with all the defensive linemen pushing away offensive linemen while receivers run their routes and such, but overall those plays seem similar.
I mean, when ultimate is described to people who don’t know the sport, the most common way is to say that it’s a combination of American football, soccer, and basketball, with American football being the closest relative.
EDIT: Here’s a short ~2 minute example of a “throw the disc to your teammate who’s running into the end zone” play, with some minor analysis of how the play came about. I’m guessing a typical American football passing play is more complicated, but I think they’re fundamentally fairly similar.
Ultimate frisbee is, to me, more similar to soccer than to any other professional sport. Or arguably women’s lacrosse.
American football is highly variable, the amount of time that a QB has to make a throw on a play is not known going in because it depends on what scheme the defense is using and how well his blockers hold up. Every play then includes potential fakes on both sides, and the potential for dozens of mistakes within the same play. These can be used to level the athletic difference between top receivers and top defenders, as near zero defenders can match up against the top receivers for more than a couple of seconds. Frisbee (at higher levels) lacks this dynamic of being able to prevent a top receiver with a complicated defensive scheme that allows you to attack the thrower for a variety of reasons (absent a few weather related situations).
Frisbee has a lot of the elements of soccer, but without the extreme skill needed to score. Frisbee ends up like a soccer/basketball hybrid where the flow on the field has similarities to soccer, but the scoring is at a rate closer to basketball. Outside of extreme weather conditions you aren’t going to get 1-0, or even 4-3 games in frisbee.
A lot of these elements are what makes it (imo) way more fun to play as a player, but less interesting as a professional level sport.
This is true of ultimate too, though. Of course, there’s the hard time limit of 10 seconds for any given thrower, but depending on what sort of scheme the defense is using and how good the offense is at adjusting to it, whoever is holding the disc could conceivably have anywhere between 1 and 9 seconds to get rid of the disc before the defense clamps down and leaves only bad options.
This is also true of ultimate. Faking, both for throwers and receivers, is a basic fundamental skill in ultimate that’s used basically continually. Same with the potential for dozens of mistakes, by any of the 14 players on the field.
This isn’t true, though. At the top levels (i.e. USAU club or international national-team play between a handful of countries (USA, Canada, Japan, UK, Columbia for women)), top receivers do get prevented from dominating, through defensive schemes. Usually not as complicated as how you describe football, but a good defensive scheme centered around preventing handlers from getting easy long throw looks and protecting the deep space allows one to stop a top receiver. Obviously not perfectly – a top receiver, by definition, is really good at receiving and is thus able to succeed sometimes even when teams plan schemes around them, but this is true in football too. It’s not as if having a top receiver on the opposite team means that you might as well give up on the point; top receivers are hard to stop, but they do get stopped regularly at the top levels of the sport.
But getting back to the point, you still haven’t explained what you mean by it turning into team golf.
Isn’t that the version played with circular saw blades?
A hammer gone wrong can certainly feel that way.
These aren’t the same thing, a play in football can end at any point in time by the defense forcing it, in ultimate the offense always has the full 10 seconds if they choose. This is a clear distinction for defensive tactics and the ability of the defense to (possibly) dictate pace.
The all time record in the NFL for receiving TDs is 23 in a 16 game season. The all time record for a single game in the AUDL (just to pick one league) is 22 scores- and these guys aren’t anywhere near peak athletic potential.
I don’t think the argument was ever “Ultimate is exactly like football” just that Ultimate is more like football than it is like golf.
As others have noted, it is probably more like soccer or lacrosse than either. Obviously defense in ultimate is different than defense in football.
It isn’t very clear what point you are trying to make. Would you like to just go ahead and make it?
Yes, ultimate and American football are different sports with different rules that result in different defensive (and offensive) tactics being effective and employed. This doesn’t change the fact that there are broad similarities between the sports as it comes to the flow of the game, much like how soccer and ice hockey are different sports with different rules that result in different defensive tactics being effective and employed, while still having broad similarities when it comes to how the games flow.
And this is the 3rd time I’m asking this, with you not having even acknowledged the question the 1st 2 times: how do you envision ultimate as being more similar to team golf than American football? Again, there are plenty of differences between American football and ultimate, but whatever those differences might be, the differences between team golf and ultimate seem far greater.
Yes, ultimate and American football are different sports with different rules that result in different scoring patterns. A typical AUDL game has around 30-50 total scores by both teams, while a typical NFL game has around 6-15 total scores by both teams (taking the average score of ~43 points and dividing by 3 for field goals or 7 for touchdowns + extra points). Ultimate is a sport that favors offense far more than American football does, from what I can tell (also in the AUDL they use 80 yard fields with 20 yard end zones rather than 100 & 10, which obviously helps the offense).
None of this changes the fact that in ultimate defenses do regularly shut down dominant receivers. It’s just that the standards of shutting down someone is different in ultimate compared to American football, much like how a 45% success rate would make one a top-tier batter in the MLB but a pretty mediocre quarterback in the NFL.
Sure. Ultimate has a skill level issue at high levels. You can flat out do more throwing a frisbee than you can with a football, and it is a lot easier to catch a frisbee than a football, and the rules of ultimate favor offensive play as it is. As levels get higher these things matter more, there are levels of precision that a handler can have that pretty much negates defense.
An example: Last night I played pickup and my best throw to a 50+ year old woman who plays a couple of times a month and who was being guarded by a 25 year old woman who is quite a bit faster than the receiver. The defender played under and I curled about a 30 yard flick around her and to the receiver. A passable (some would dispute that I rise to that level) pick up handler can negate a defender who has a large edge in speed/athleticism, if I could make a throw that well almost every time, a not unreasonable prospect at all for decent players, then I could force bracket coverage on the open side for my best receiver every time, or nearly guarantee yards. If I am then quick enough to get an open dump/swing/upline pass from that receiver we can do it again and again. If I have a high quality break throw, like a hammer, the two of us could beat 3 defenders semi regularly.
This is not an uncommon issue with sports, and often their are rule changes that favor the defense quite heavily to counteract these. In soccer one guy gets to also use his hands* but only on defense, in american football cornerbacks can physically jam/push receivers in a narrow band and defenders are allowed to literally tackle the passer if they can get there before he throws it.
*yes also throw ins.
This is a real issue, but handlers can’t negate a defense. At the top levels, because everyone is so good at throwing and catching, the structure of the game becomes more like high-level tennis, where the person who’s serving is expected to win every point, and the victor is determined by who can get more breaks. In ultimate, the team that’s receiving the pull is expected to win every point, and the victor is determined by whichever team can get more break-points. In 2016, in the USAU men’s finals game between Boston and San Francisco, there were a grand total of 7 turnovers in a total of 27 points, just 5 of those being break-points (14-13 final score) – this is unusually low, but not by that much.
Of course, we would expect offensive players to get better if they’re given $millions and full time to train, which could translate to more offensive dominance which would be boring, but interestingly enough, this hasn’t been the case over the past ~20 years which has seen a lot more athleticism and talent going into ultimate. A large part of it is that you also get more athletic defenders as well as a continuing evolution of defensive sets. You almost never see elite ultimate teams go with straight person-person defense these days, because that only really works if you have a clear athletic advantage over the other team (which is almost never the case, since athleticism tends to be fairly evenly distributed at that level). That doesn’t mean they tend to go with zone unless it’s windy/rainy, though; rather, teams have systems of switching and poaching in order to increase effectiveness beyond just the straight person-person defensive sets.
And of course, there’s plenty of evolution that could happen to offensive strategy as well, to negate the advantages gained by evolution of defensive strategy. So ultimately, it’s hard to say how the game would evolve if all the players were NFL-level athletic and with NFL-level investment in strategy, but I don’t think it’s clear that it would just become all offense all the time. That hasn’t been the trend as the elite levels have become more athletic (I believe it’s slightly been the opposite, actually, where back in the early 2000s, # of turnovers in elite level games were lower than they are now).
“Frisbee golf” or “Disc Golf” is a thing, but it is distinct from Ultimate in every way except being a sport involving frisbee/disc-things. Are you getting the two confused?
As others have noted, Ultimate maps pretty closely to soccer or lacrosse or field hockey but with discs. It completely fails to match the defining feature of golf, which is that only one player at a time is trying to do anything and nobody else may try to stop or hinder or even distract them. So I’m not seeing how you expect a formalization of Ultimate to become “team golf”.
For that matter, I’m not sure what you envision as “team golf”. Boring regular golf but using the combined scores of multiple players? Or do we have one offensive player trying to hit the ball into the hole while ten offensive blockers with long metal clubs try to stop ten defensive player with clubs from beating him to a pulp first, and a holetender with a club tries to swat the ball out of the sky before it reaches the hole?
I changed my mind. Replace American football with that, whatever we decide to call that sport.
This sounds like it should be called “Sportsball” and be primarily played by veteran Marines.
@woah77
I am now a Sportsball fan.
@EchoChaos
I am not a sportsball fan, but I’d at least have a real sport to go with my joke about how I don’t follow sportsball. I generically call all sports “sportsball” in common parlance, much to the amusement of my coworkers. Conversations typically go something like this:
“Did you catch the bears game last night?”
“Ah, no. I don’t actually follow the sportsball.”
Wouldn’t that ruin the joke? I thought the point of saying “sportsball” was to pretend that you’re so ignorant of sports you can’t even name one.
I’d like adults to go to the movies more – maybe once a week on average. There’s no one activity I want to disprivelege to make room for this – just a little less of everything else.
Maybe that way it would be easier to get good quality mid-budget films made again.
I’d like to encourage drivers to be more courteous on the road. To this end I propose the A-hole gun. Every driver gets an A-hole gun with one shot per year, with which they can tag another driver. If a driver gets (say) ten tags in a year they are fined (say) $1,000, which goes to pay for the A-hole gun program.
George Carlin’s estateGallagher is now suing you. Also you missed.Replace the writing system with Japanese-like system of ideographic stem plus phonetic inflection/disambiguation (with phonemes grouped into syllables a’la Hangul).
Smaller change: make all sports adopt association football league rules (get rid of play-offs, award championship to regular season winners; fans of knockout tournaments get a separate “cup” competition; mandatory promotion/relegation system).
Useful pockets on all pants and jackets are seen as highly fashionable and thus sewn into all clothing. I’ve heard complaints about lack of pockets from approximately every one of my female friends, and on occasions when my clothes don’t have pockets I feel their pain.
Yes please!
Also, wearing cell phones etc. in belt holsters becomes normal, even fashionable, for both genders, rather than geekish, and cell phones routinely come with appropriate holsters – in a range of fashionable colours and styles.
A friend of mine in high school made a leather holster for his graphing calculator. It was amazing.
When walking I invariably swing my arms in a way that knocks off and breaks all of those elastic belt-clip lanyards that are used for badges, and would invariably do the same for a cell phone holster (I briefly tried with a cell phone holster).
Placing the holster further forward interferes with bathroom usage, placing it further back interferes with sitting. At least with the typical belt-loop layouts.
My current pants (Dickies) all come with a cell phone pocket (or two) on the right leg below the knee. And I love it.
sorry, above the knee.
Yes. Give women pockets and men manbags.
(for blokes who want to carry a lot without a rucksack, i’d recommend getting a bike and some orillieb panniers with a shoulder strap. It’s like a 20l handbag which is completely waterproof.
We have a solution. They are called cargo pants. Everyone “cool” hates cargo pants.
There’s still a gap in the 10-20l range that manbags would fill nicely.
For spare shirts, 1st aid kits, water bottles, welding gauntlets, scrolls, folding umbrellas, shoes, binoculars, small orchids etc.
Aren’t laptop bags fine for filling the lower end of that range? I see men carrying those. You don’t have to put laptops in them.
Gauntlets but no torch?
Not exactly culture but law, but will affect culture bigly, I guess. Parts possibly exist in some countries.
Change Copyright to
– Automatic registration on publication
– Duration 15* years
– Can be prolonged for another 15* years for a small fee but requires holder activity
– No further prolongation under any circumstance
– Gratuitous fair use, no permission required
*The exact number is open to debate.
And for security culture:
– Make all hacking and research on computer security legal. Illegality starts when harm is done with intention, e.g. results are used for damage instead of vulnerability warnings.
Coffee shops, dutch version. Legal drugs.
Together with school education on hacking your brain and body (how, results, dangers, damages — a bit like sex ed has become the norm in more enlightened countries).
Plus physician and therapist certifications and reimbursement rates for this new domain covering expert advice as well as treatment/prevention of the downsides it will inevitably also have.
Why would you re-watch a film that you thought at the time was nothing special? I’m curious because other people also do this. (leaving aside that it exceeded expectations the second time). It’s more of a general question than specific to you or this film.
Well, if I know that I have changed over time enough to see some things showed in the film in a different way, it is often a good idea. Same applies to books; though it is not uncommon that I get disappointed in a piece of literature I enjoyed before, vice versa also happens.
Additionally, if someone I know recommends me something I didn’t like before, and provides new insight into how they perceived the book/film, that often sparks enough interest in me to take a second look.
But that’s a very general question, and I can’t say more without knowing the context. For example, are you interested in fiction or non-fiction movies in this question?
Can you watch English language films? If so, watching Shakespeare is probably easier than reading. Trying a clip on youtube is easy.
Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of audio/video format in general, since I have some troubles with grasping audio even if it’s not a foreign language. Reading is so much easier for me.
I appreciate the suggestion, though.
With some movies that on first viewing seemed just ok, as time passes I get a weird feeling that the movie is more enjoyable than I clearly remember it to be (it’s often fueled by watching eg youtube videos analyzing various aspect of that film), and so I rewatch it to see if really it has grown on me. Doesn’t happen all that often though.
And in a more general fashion I am trying to make a habit of rewatching stuff that I remember liking but that I haven’t watched in a while, to reassess whether I still like it as much, less than before, or more than before (I found this necessary as it turns out my tastes are rapidly evolving).
Maybe it’s a really respected work that didn’t impress you the first time around, and you’re rewatching it either to give it another chance or to figure out what others see in it.
I’m occasionally tempted to give Shakespeare another chance.
I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare in middle school in translation to my native language and enjoyed it a lot. More than that, I have never heard outside of English-speaking communities anyone who would talk about Shakespeare as of something “hard”. Classical, yes, but quite easy to read. I feel like many native English speakers miss the beauty of his works because of the language difficulties, which are not that problematic in translations, and that adds a rather strange side to the whole story.
I’m occasionally tempted to try to read him in original, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get through such a text.
Johan, watch film versions of Shakespeare plays. Start with Kenneth Branaugh’s Henry and Hamlet.
NO! NOOOOO!!!!!! Don’t start with Ken Bloody Branagh! Don’t end with Ken Branagh! Don’t go near Ken Branagh! Horrible old ham.
Joss Whedon’s Much Ado is pretty good, and features a stellar performance from Amy Acker as Beatrice.
Under no circumstances watch the Ethan Hawke Hamlet.
If you can stomach a black and white recording of a stage production, I believe Richard Burton’s Hamlet is all on YouTube and is pretty incredible.
My picks would be Lawrence Oliver’s Hamlet and Kurowasa’s Throne of Blood (which is MacBeth in feodal Japan — obviously you lose the original text but it’s still one of the best Shakespeare-based movies). I heard very good things about the 2015 adaptation of MacBeth but haven’t watched it yet.
Branagh’s Much Ado and Henry V are excellent, his Hamlet and As You Like It are weird and bad.
I will fight anyone on any one of those opinions.
Trevor Nunn’s Othello is superb. Willard White and Sir Ian McKellen in the lead roles.
Branagh is great.
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is much better than it has any right to be, largely because its Mercutio is one of the best that’s ever been filmed.
Man, Branagh’s Much Ado is basically ruined by its camerawork. Benedick and Beatrice are rarely on screen together, and then Beatrice’s big monologue has some of the worst blocking ever, despite good work by Emma Thompson. Whedon’s version makes the story accessible to the layman.
Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet is pretty great. There’s Mckellan’s Richard III, too. BBC’s recent King Lear, featuring Anthony “Hannibal Lecter” Hopkins and Emma Thompson, was Emmy nominated.
Of course, if we include indirect adaptations like Throne of Blood, then we obviously have to include West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, 10 Things I Hate About You, Curse of the Golden Flower, She’s the Man, etc.
Honestly, though, you could do worse than attending the Shakespeare in the Park performances every year, since they provide synopses and the audience reaction will help guide your interpretation, and those productions are also doing their best to make the story accessible to laymen.
Also Ian McKellen’s Richard III. Great stuff, plenty of explosions, which Shakespeare usually sadly lacks.
Boredom. Although that’s something that is sorely missing these days.
Boredom is part of it, but also desire for variety. I don’t only listen to my favorite song either, or just my favorite song by each band I like. Sometimes I’ll listen to one of the songs I liked least on an album I otherwise liked just because I haven’t heard it in a while.
I also don’t only eat my favorite foods. Sometimes I eat very average foods (or worse).
@Eri
The context was MachineInterface rewatching Fury Road after not loving it first time around.
@MachineInterface
Film analysis is isn’t something I do (do a lot of people do this?), but coincidentally I did so last week for the first time with The Shining: analysis was a mixture of pointing out Kubrick’s subtleness, and some dubious speculation by the analyst.
@johan_larson
This makes sense, except I’ve mainly done it with books. Eg The Name of the Rose, Catch 22 were hard to get into but a second attempt paid off.
I first did Julius Caesar at 14-15 in school and was bored. Did Macbeth at 17-18 and thought it was great. I don’t know what that implies. Maybe try one of the filmed versions.
@Urstoff
I suspect this is the main reason.
I sometimes just want to zone out in front of something I don’t really have to engage with, especially if I’m tired and/or drunk. Mediocre lowbrow films I’ve already seen are a strong candidate.
If I’m rewatching a mediocre arty film, it’s more likely to be for professional reasons (considering working with someone involved). Alternatively, someone I respect might have convinced me to give it a second chance in the hope of changing my mind about it (one notable example for me was Juno, which I disliked on first viewing and now very much enjoy).
+1 Zoning out: Yeah, that too, esp. during depressive episodes. Shitty, but true.
Another possibility is just watching movies with friends. Depending on the movie, watching it with friends can be an easy way to turn it from mediocre to great. Comedies are probably the most susceptible to this.
Never trust an opinion about a bit of art you made over 5 years ago, as a general principle. Aside from the personal ways you’ve changed (or rather, are not obligated to be consistent with past notion of self) the conditions of the world change, alliances in society churn and shift, in ways that give things different resonances just a few years apart. You can start to become fascinated by the meta-trends you realize, as well, if you try something like watching the same sorts of movies made on either side of 9/11 (or whatever phenomenon occured that changed trends.) In the movies of year 1999 it seemed like a slow descent into Hell to have a regular $50k office job in a way that seems odd in the “you don’t have to justify making money in an authentic soul-affirming way, you have to do it to survive” ethos of 2019.
These sorts of things are interesting enough to me to want to rewatch things and have new takes
When I was interested in the poetics of film making, the visual language, the sound effects, story arcs and sub-arcs, symbolism, citations, etc., I had a habit of letting the movie wash over me without any analyzing, thinking too much, etc the first time, and one or a few days later I rewatched, this time trying to catch the crafty/technical things I mentioned, sometimes taking scene-by-scene notes. (That was in a cinema before video tapes and a pause button came along.)
To enjoy all the hints that only become meaningful from the ending. Example: “The usual suspects”.
How geographically aware are most people? I don’t mean that in the sense of knowing the capital of Kenya, I mean being aware of where on a globe you are and what is around you.
Whenever I go somewhere new, I always keep a rough map in my head of the country/state I’m visiting, with the major cities marked. At home, although my memory for streets isn’t the greatest, I like to know where I generally am relative to the nearest big city and/or other landmarks, and I browse Google Maps for fun fairly often. By now I can draw a pretty good map of the USA from memory.
Then I went to Berlin, and met some students who, despite having lived there for over a year, were completely unaware that Poland was to their east and that the border is only a ~3h drive away. This boggled me but if you think about it, knowing where borders lie is not relevant to most people’s day-to-day lives, so maybe people who aren’t into geography would have no reason to hold onto such information.
So, am I the unusual one, or are they?
Usually I’m not even aware of my immediate surroundings in that sense. I mean sure, I remember what landmarks are around me and how they are related to each other approximately, but that’s more like a graph structure of places and paths between them, rather than a coherent 2d map.
I’m like you, but I’ve met people who aren’t.
I’ve lived in Cleveland for four years, and a couple of days ago I found that a coworker (who has been here at least as long) had no idea the city had a river. The river is big enough for commercial traffic, is the only reason there’s a city here, and is within a mile or two of the office.
I once got a ride with a guy who didn’t know which way was north right in front of his apartment, and didn’t even know the name of the street he lived on.
Who could miss the river that catches on fire?
Most of the time I have a pretty good sense of the cardinal directions, but I do get tripped up every now and then, especially if I’m taking a trip with a lot of slowly-curving roads, or I’m in the woods. I’m pretty good with larger geographical stuff (knowing where I am relative to cities or other things that are put on maps). I’m definitely better than most people at this stuff, and your self-description is better than me, so I would suspect you are fairly unusual in this respect.
I live and breath in my sense of geography. Sure, there are places I’m less familiar with, but I keep track of my location mentally and where I am in relation to major landmarks often. I build a mental map of anywhere I go to, adding the locations into my sense of where things are.
I’m with you on this, almost always aware of cardinal directions and with a pretty good mental map of my surroundings – very good in the places I live and work. But I think we are unusual, at least among cosmopolitan Blue and Grey tribe culture. Cities, and the norms of urban civility, are designed to make geography as irrelevant as possible to their interchangeable residents, and with GPS and Uber as crutches I too am finding it increasingly common to find people of incredible geographic cluelessness.
Manhattan is a major exception here, with uptown, downtown, east side, west side all being very prominent.
Is this the case?
I’ve lived in 3 major cities now and every single one of them had distinctive neighborhoods; maybe a tourist wouldn’t pick up on it, but anyone living there more than 2 months would.
Take Seattle – Fremont feels different from Pioneer Square which feels different than the waterfront, which feels different than greenlake… That’s probably the bluest/greyest cities I’ve ever been and I found the geographic separations there incredibly noticeable.
Does it matter whether Freemont is North, South, East, or West of Pioneer square, when you’re just going to call an Uber and say “Take me to Pioneer square”?
Hmmm, good point. I honestly don’t know.
ETA: if it “matters” I mean. Fremont is obviously north of pioneer square.
Staggering geographical ignorance isn’t uncommon.
I knew a young woman in college who sincerely believed that Egypt was a US state. And it’s not like she was some sheltered American, she had lived much of her life in Dubai. Egypt was physically closer to her than either her home country or America were.
That’s a somewhat extreme example, but for most people it seems like other countries might as well be located on the moon. Which would have been a reasonable attitude for a peasant farmer a few centuries ago but is a bit silly now that a trip to the other side of the world can be completed in less than a single day and we are in constant nearly-instantaneous communication with people all across the globe.
I have a friend who went to an academically excellent private school, read Maths and ComSci at Oxford, and subsequently went on first to found and run a successful indie games company for over a decade then to become the CTO of a medical technology business. He is neither stupid nor educationally deprived.
In our early 20s, he was surprised to discover that Cuba was not in Eastern Europe.
At roughly the same time, he had to ask me which way to get on the motorway to get from Oxford to London (as in northbound or southbound). He had lived in or near Oxford his entire life. London is 50 miles away.
> Cuba was not in Eastern Europe
Somewhat plausible that he only ever heard it mention as part of the “Eastern Bloc”, and/or together with the USSR.
Weird mistake. Was she confused by the existence of Memphis, perhaps?
I bounce back and forth between New England (where I grew up) and Illinois (college). I have two different modes of navigation:
New England cow paths: Which way’s North? Hell if I know! But to get downtown you just turn right here, right again at the tree, left up at the top of the hill…[etc]…and past the post office. Essentially it’s subway-map-style navigation: I have no idea where things are geographically, but I know exactly how to get between them.
Midwestern grid layout: Whoa, you can just build roads at right angles to each other? This is great! As long as I keep track of which way is north, all I need is the coordinates of a location to get there! How do you get to the library? Well it’s just three blocks south and four blocks west…so you go south three blocks and west four blocks. (Or west four blocks and south three blocks.) I could probably draw a decent campus map from memory.
I’m a lot like you, but run into people who aren’t more often than not. On the micro level, I’ll give directions like “go north” and my wife will say “yes, but which way do I turn?” On the macro level, I went to the state Geography Bee twice, and studied a lot for that. But I think I’m the weird one here.
There is a big discrepancy for me between large scale and small scale geography.
I can point out most European countries on a map (for different continents I’d estimate I can get maybe 70%), but I’m completely hopeless at getting anywhere at all without a GPS and I frequently get the relative locations of nearby (<100km) towns and cities wrong.
Edit: Telling which way is north is also hopeless unless I have some way to deduce it.
I’m with you. I’ve been to 40 countries and I can fill in a world map pretty completely (>90% of landmass certainly) but even in my home city where I have lived for a decade I need Google Maps to get anywhere I have not been repeatedly and I have to stop and think about it to figure out cardinal directions.
Declarative and procedural memory. You probably learned in different modes.
I had a good sense of the area I grew up in, but less of anywhere I’ve lived since. And when I simply fly into a place to visit it, I have even less sense of the surrounding area.
Part of what changed this for me was spoken navigation directions in my vehicle – I don’t have to consult a map to go anywhere, and if my map’s on a cell phone or similar device, it’s too small to really read. Paper maps were much better for giving me a general sense of where I was – but those are so passé as to be completely unreliable for anything built in the last decade.
I was born a geographical idiot, but I have been able to train myself into the common level of incompetence. I was completely unable, as a kid, to draw a map of a place I was familiar with, or give simple, clear directions. It would be like, “go straight, then you’ll see the gas station – no wait, in order to see the gas station you need to turn left from the road, go straight, and it will be on your right… you need to do this left turn before you see the roundabout with the olive tree”. Time and space were completely confusing to me. I wouldn’t get lost in a familiar place, but any new place, I would get lost.
My brother’s geographical abilities, and my general competitive streak, meant I spent a lot of effort as a kid on doing that. But I think that geographical abilities are a type of intelligence not everybody has, and for some people, these things are much harder than for others. I am not sure how people are distributed, though.
I find it strange that people would not be aware of a river. Most cities with rivers are divided by it, and a path that may be straight in a map could be quite longer if there aren’t many bridges. Maybe Cleveland’s river is not a geographic obstacle?
In my head, when I walk in a city with a river, the river serves as the axis of reference; you need to keep in mind on which side of the river you are, where you want to go, and which bridge is closest. And, if I am in an unfamiliar place in the city, once I find the river, I’m not lost anymore; I just walk up or downstream until I have to go to my destination.
It may be because people walk less now? Walking in a city is the perfect speed to learn it well. It also makes you more aware of features like hills.
Downtown is all east of the river, so if you don’t live or work on the west side I guess there’s no reason to go there.
When in my home city, I tend to be oriented to approximate cardinal directions based on the street directions, and have a rough idea of where I am in the city; in neighborhoods I know better, I have a clearer idea still, and in neighborhoods I know less well I still generally know which major roads are nearby and in which directions. I don’t travel “linearly” (that is, with navigation exposed to me via driving or similar, as opposed to planes or other mass transit which is scheduled point-to-point and where I ignore almost the entire route being taken) outside my city well enough to have a map of the surrounding area except for a vague understanding of where some suburbs are. I have a very rough idea of where my city is in my state, and I know very well where my state is in the US, and where the US is in the world, but I couldn’t draw accurate country-level maps of many other places in the world except for some big prominent ones; I’d be slightly better at a map of US states, but I’d still get confused on some of the weirder clusters.
When traveling, I try to keep an approximate mental map of the local places I’m visiting, including cardinal directions. Usually this is a very small map, because my travel is usually for specific events which strongly incentivize staying nearby the whole time. Excursions (via taxi or similar) to “random” other spots in destination cities are rare due to logistics and often don’t get their map information retained.
I read this as asking if we have a sense of direction. I do. It’s highly dependent to time, which I think is understandable: I know where things are in space based on my memory of the time of day and how the sunlight shone on them. Which means my sense is retarded when navigating at night or when it’s cloudy. Also, new locations where the roads often wind around hills are challenging.
Put me in a certain place for long enough, however, and the sun will come out and I will get a fix on things. A map helps. I live in Columbia, Maryland; I feel aware of Catonsville, Elkridge, and Baltimore to my northeast, with Aberdeen, Havre de Grace, Philly, and NYC far beyond; Laurel, Silver Spring, Bethesda, and DC to my southwest; Greenbelt, College Park to my south; Bowie, Davidsonville, and Annapolis to my southeast; Olney, Rockville, and “Germanthersburg” to my west.
These are in my mind as both nodes on a graph, whose edges are named roads, and also as regions on a continuous surface: if I could fly a plane or helicopter, I could easily transit between them, and if I saw smoke in the distance, I could tell you which town it’s near.
Meanwhile, I can probably label every country in the world, and in many cases give a rough location (and name) of its capital, though admittedly this is mostly due to my trivia drive.
My reliance on the “nodes on a graph” model is strongest wherever I rely on public transit, e.g. DC Metro. Especially if most of it’s underground, understandably. But I’ve driven in DC enough that it’s only supplementary even there. I imagine people who rely solely on public transit will most likely let their direction sense atrophy. In order of stronger direction sense comes people who commute in the city or suburbs, people who day hike, people who live in the country, people who work in delivery service, people who backpack and hike cross country.
There have been studies done on the differences men and women have in getting from point A to point B.
So were these students female or male? 😀
Yeah, I heard about that study too- about how men prefer cardinal directions while women prefer landmarks, iirc. It’s not quite what I have in mind, though; I’m talking about imagining a larger-scale map of the area, not necessarily being able to point north relative to where you’re standing. (I personally can’t point north without pausing and thinking it through, I wish my brain were more male in that regard.)
I don’t remember the gender composition of the students.
I like to think I have excellent cardinal directions – so long as I’m in a rectangular grid and haven’t been spun around.
For two years I thought the street in front of my office window was 90 degrees off from what it actually was, and only realized this when I pointed a coworker to the wrong direction multiple times for a food truck.
In college, I managed to do a 180 and start jogging away from campus after running after a deer in the woods.
So I need to get my bearings first, and deliberately take a look at where I am now. Games like EU4 help immensely with geography though (like apparently Taiwan is really close to the Philippines and the backup plan for the nationalists back in the day was to go there if Taiwan fell)
If I had to show cities in my country on a map, I could probably place correctly less than ten. I know which countries are next to mine, and which direction they are; and I could also point in a direction of Germany or Russia. I don’t like traveling, so more detailed information is emotionally irrelevant to me.
On the other hand, if we go on a vacation somewhere, I usually take a map and try to learn the shape of the city. It is easier because it is new, and because it is relevant to what we will do in the following days.
10 months ago I became an NPC. That’s the best and most intrigue-worthy way I can describe it, and I’m desperate for intrigue here. My experience of the world became much less intense; my anxiety and intrusive thoughts vanished. I no longer spoke to myself; nothing made any mental impression. I may have lost a little intellect.
Initially, I considered suicide, but not in the upset way that I sometimes had before. It was totally dispassionate; I wasn’t sure that my new mode of living was worth it. I’ve since stopped having those thoughts, but for a terrifying reason: I’m struggling to remember what my experience of the world used to be like. I’m posting because I’m desperate, and I want (literally any) guesses about what happened or how to go back. I’ll provide some information and my personal hypotheses:
-I’m 21, male.
-In the preceding months I had been, for the first time, experimenting with chemicals I knew about from the internet. These were: Minoxidil (for a beard), expired accutane pills (for acne), and ashwagandha (for anxiety). I stopped taking / applying all of them when I started to notice the change.
-Seven months prior I had become a vegan, one month prior I quit.
Hypotheses:
1. Everyone leaves the “infinity of youth” eventually (“the first twenty years are the longest half of your life” and such). I just happened to be a rare case in which the change is sharp, not gradual. [But how often does ageing cure anxiety?]
2. The expired accutane pills severely damaged my brain. I’ve gone through basically every internet-post on expired accutane, and while only one person has had reported severe effects, they were life-changingly bad, and accutane is a serious drug.
3. Two or more of the chemicals interacted in some way.
I understand this isn’t an ordinary post / it probably violates some rule / I’m not very rational. Nonetheless, I’d very much appreciate some input from the smartest community I know.
Have you considered consulting with a psychiatrist? What about doing some kind of a brain scan to check for something like a silent stroke?
I don’t think your experience is normal as you describe it.
I can’t really speak for the rest of it, but aging can absolutely cure anxiety.
Teenagers are a mess of conflicting hormones and rapidly changing bodily subsystems, and that screws with your mental state. When I got older, I got better adjusted.
I can also speak somewhat to the “lost a little intellect” bit.
When I was a young to mid-teen, I was, at the risk of sounding immodest, pretty sharp. As in I read several books a day most days, had a literally photographic memory, and was strolling my way through school with good grades effortlessly.
I was also kind of a wreck; I was unhappy almost all of the time, I worried constantly, and was low-key suicidal pretty regularly. Never made a very serious attempt; only things on the order of “this is a hot day, I could just stay in this car with the windows up until I cooked” level, but lots of passive suicidal ideation.
One day, in the midst of some stuff, it was like my brain suddenly popped and shifted gears. It was almost that sudden, honestly. Pretty rapidly, most of my anxiety vanished, the suicidal thoughts dropped through the floor in frequency and actively repulsed me when they happened, and I also lost a fair bit of that previous mental acuity.
Like, when I say that, I don’t mean I’m dumb now. I’m still very smart. But I can’t memorize a novel in two hours and repeat it back word-for-word, and I more gradually lost the ability to accurately transcribe novels I had previously memorized. I hit a wall in my ability to casually soak up new information without trying, and had to learn to actually study and take notes and stuff. I generally feel less sharp, in ways that are hard to quantify.
In my personal case, I also concluded that I’m a lot happier now, and this is a total improvement in my quality of life. But it was a very weird transition, and it’s still very weird when I compare my memories of myself then to my impression of myself now. And it happened suddenly, with no particular warning or trigger I recall. I just suddenly looked around and saw all these things which had seemed important or scary before and did not care about them the same way.
There are times when I sort of have a vague feeling like I could switch gears back, and when I get that feeling I make sure not to investigate it, because I’m better now and don’t want to be like that any more.
I don’t know if any of that explanation is helpful to you, but it’s what I’ve got.
As far as advice, go engage in physical activity. Go running. Lift weights. Get some sunshine. Exercise is good for the physiology. Gets all your systems firing, get the metabolism fired up, shake things loose in your brain.
I remember sitting in my Grade 10 chemistry class one afternoon, and thinking to myself that I was able to remember every single individual lesson that I’d had that year.
Now I can barely remember what happened last week.
About what age did this happen to you? I experienced something similar between the ages of 25-28, although the change wasn’t as quick, and childbearing is a lurking variable.
Late teens.
I had similar experience is the ~23 – 26 age range and without the variable of childbirth. I went from several quantitative variables indicating I was >2 standard deviations above average in IQ to nothing quantitative but being clearly less.. to use OPs word: sharp. My wife had the same thing happen at 21 but hers was directly related to a head impact.
Similar experience, age 20. Hauntingly similar, I think it was in a span of a week or two that I went from incredibly stressed and depressed to “huh, who gives a damn” with a big decline in mental activity. Drugs NOT a factor, wasn’t on any drugs.
Then things improved and I was happy, and then I had a damn near total collapse.
I will say that though I feel less sharp, I definitely feel more structured. Teens ADBG could read a thousand books, 30s ADBG can pick out one or two important ones and pick up the important ideas (and explain them to other people).
It’s interesting that you say that about the books, because it tracks well with my experience.
When I was young, I could zip through a book, and then I could repeat it back to you just about word-for-word, but I wasn’t really digesting it.
I didn’t stop and chew things over, or analyze and appreciate them.
Those skills are things I picked up later in life. I honestly think I enjoy reading a lot more these days, even though I’m a lot less efficient at it. I get a lot more out of reading, now that I’m not just memorizing the words and spitting them back out.
This was very heartening to read. Thank you.
No input on the substance of your post, but you’re not violating any rules or norms by posting this here. It’s well within the kind of thing that can be discussed here.
Actually, I vaguely remember others talking about similar things happening to them here before, though I can’t remember any details. Perhaps one of them will happen by this post. (Sorry to give such a tantalising hint without following through with any details.)
In my admittedly limited experience early twenties are the most turbulent time with regards to changing worldview. Chances are before you hit thirty you’ll go through several more paradigm shifts, some will be more noticeable than others, so don’t despair, it’s very likely you haven’t hit an end state yet (if there is one).
As an aside, I can really relate to not being able to connect with or understand your past self, like it’s some other person (which he is to a degree). No real advice other than it’s probably smart to arrange your life around what you are currently rather than try to go back to what you used to be. If things that you liked before lost their appeal, try new stuff, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Aging can cure anxiety, but not that fast. I’m going to guess it was the drugs and you need to see a doctor.
The anxiety and intrusive thoughts disappearing sounds good. The lack of mental impression (not really sure what that means) and loss of a stream of thought does not. And considering suicide sounds bad (not in the sense that you’re sinning or something like that, just it sounds shitty to be going through this).
It’s good you’re recognizing that you have a problem you need help with. Whatever’s going on with you, it seems serious enough to warrant looking for solutions.
But honestly, it sounds to me like the kind of help you need is not “let’s ask some smart people on the internet”. You need a therapist/counselor/whatever who you trust and respect enough to value their informed opinions about your mental state. Go find one, and if that one doesn’t work, find another. There is no shortcut here. Beyond providing you with some positive feedback, it’s very unlikely that anyone here can help you in any meaningful way.
It occurs to me that it’s possible that the kind of positive feedback and thoughtful responses you’re getting from, e.g., @phigment above might be all you need. In which case, good on you, and I’m glad your problem isn’t, in the grand scheme of things, that bad.
But if that isn’t the case (and I think it isn’t, based on my very limited ability to judge based on your single post), then you need someone like Scott – I don’t mean a clever dude who writes a really good blog, I mean a mental health professional who you can pay money to help you with your brain.
+1. Hope things work out for you, @Papillon, but you probably need a professional more than us internetians on the open thread.
Definitely talk with an expert. Sudden change like this is suspicious; if there is an underlying biological cause, you may want to know what it is. If this happened in 10 months, there might be more waiting in the following 10 months.
In the meanwhile, if you meet a PC, don’t fight with them, give them a quest instead.
> But how often does ageing cure anxiety?
Generally, it seems the older you are the less you give f*ck about things. Various reasons: you are less dragged towards various directions by hormones; you have more to do and therefore less energy to think about things irrelevant to immediate survival; you have already seen a lot of stuff in the past and even the new stuff seems to belong to some already seen reference group.
Could be depression, could be ego death, could be discovering a new way to think. It sounds basically like my default experience, except I experience it more like not-being-an-NPC.
As far as I can tell, most people experience their internal monologue as a sense-of-self, which is to say, they think of their internal voice as themselves. More, they think of that monologue as their “thoughts”, which is where it ties into “New way to think”.
I don’t think in words. My thoughts are more like… linkages between concepts. This manner of thought is low-frequency and high-bandwidth; I think slower, but my thoughts are much larger, more than enough to offset the speed. My mental equivalent to a word is more like a Wikipedia article.
Translating these thoughts into verbal form can be challenging; you lose most of the information. The advantages, primarily of being able to think clearly about things no words exist for, seem to outweigh the disadvantages.
It is also a more conscious effort to think in terms of words, and often, but not always, requires a deliberate effort.
If that doesn’t sound familiar to you, and you find your stream of consciousness is just missing, depression or ego death are viable alternatives. Ego death seems unlikely unless you’ve used psychotics or engaged in meditation, but I don’t think spontaneous ego death is unheard of. If ego death seems unlikely, you may be depressed. Inwhichcase I recommend outdoor activities, possibly take some vitamin D
A poem about the Thirst for Knowledge, formulated jointly between myself and Ludovico (my human typist and editor [and owner!]) As usual, L’s words are set in brackets.
I’m rather fond of poetry
But fonder of don’t-knowetry
When something int’resting is seen
To flash across the PC screen
“This I must know!”
My mind races into flight
Ludovico,
You’ll be staying up tonight!
I rouse the master from his bed
With frond-slap to his weary head
“Go on, my man, take to your chair
To click just when I say, and where!”
Love for knowledge
Nearly sets my stem alight
Ludovico,
You’ll be staying up tonight!
[Oh please, my fern, I’d rather be
Asleep in bed. Why don’t you see?
Your ceaselessness is what keeps me
In such benighted misery–]
Silence, Luddy!
No more moaning ’bout your “plight”
Ludovico,
You’ll be staying up tonight!
[Now, cheeky Canyon, don’t forget
I am your human master yet!
Don’t dare to steal my snoozery
Or I’ll throw you into the sea!]
Easy, Luddy!
Let me try to put things right
Ludovico,
You’ll be fast asleep tonight!
Absolutely brilliant.
@thevoiceofthevoid,
D’aww, thanks for such a strong compliment! It’s just a bit of rhyme-work and scansion, but I’m glad you liked it.
[Now you’ve done it — the praise went straight to his fronds! -Ludovico]
If you enjoyed my poem, you’ll probably also like my rationalist comedy fanfic, Slate Star Showdex, which stars Scott as a hard-boiled detective. Here’s the most recent episode (which links to the previous ones.)
Haha, I enjoyed that as well. You’ve unfortunately removed SSC comments from the list of “things I can safely read when I’m not paying attention in class without laughing out loud”–maybe fortunately, as I ought to be paying more attention in class in the first place.
You have to have a convention about whether “Socrates is a man” implies that Socrates exists. Russell chooses one convention. But whichever convention you choose, you can conclude “Socrates is mortal.”
You could have a convention that when you deal with sets they must be nonempty. This seems like a bad idea to me.
Your rewriting is asserting that the convention for the general should be the same as the convention for the specific. But people (eg, Aristotle) distinguish the general from the specific, so it is unreasonable to assert that they should have the same convention.
Added: I assume that everyone used the convention that the specific exists, but I suspect that Aristotle or the Scholastics used both conventions for the general. But if so, this is the key error and Russell should isolate it.
2 months ago, in August (2019), the US convinced the Kurdish militia to dismantle their fortifications near The Turkish border as a sign of good will. Then 2 days ago the USA pulled out without warning (no one was warned, the European allies weren’t told and I suspect even the Pentagon had no idea) and now Turkish air and ground forces are attacking the Rojava Kurds.
Here is a quote, from 2 months ago:
“The major elements of the security mechanism now in place involve the removal of Kurdish militia fortifications, which is being done in conjunction with the Syrian Democratic Forces on the Syrian side of the border. This address the Turkish security concerns, Maier said, and demonstrates the SDF commitment to the implementation.”
Here is a link to the document, have a read and you will understand the level of treachery involved. It boggles the mind.
https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1964619/us-turkey-cooperate-in-defeat-isis-effort/fbclid/IwAR3goHQOJeOl_x8LXUg0TS9-lGuTOkZ4464Lz2qeT06GY964rqsZMinQHoM/
Yeah, this move makes me consider Trump too senile to lead. While the US turning on forces it supported is not new, it usually takes many years for the about face (Iraq, Taliban, etc.).
This is an unprecedented level of backstabbing and really helps China and Russia make the case that the US is no longer a trustworthy partner.
So, relevant news articles. According to people on the call, Erdoan bullied trump into making this play, apparently. The agreed-upon talking points going into the call were to pressure Turkey to stay north of the border, but then the president apparently caved.
For those who missed this, the president laid out talking points before the call, then apparently changed his mind during a conversation about one country invading the territory currently held by our allies. That’s nuts.
The first article also emphasizes that Trump lost Mattis over exactly this (Trump wanting to get out of Syria).
Even if that was the going in talking point, if Erdogan offered something that made sense, Trump changing his mind is totally in character and within his stated foreign policy objectives.
And that’s assuming the leaks are correct.
I suspect the only thing Trump got is…the troops coming home. One of the articles seems to agree. Gotta say that it’s good Trump wants to diminish US military presence overseas, but maybe this wasn’t the best way or place to do it.
I’m curious to hear the steelman argument in favor of the recent US withdrawal. I think it would have two components: why withdraw and why withdraw in this manner?
FWIW, I’m personally opposed to forever wars and deployments without clear objectives. Syria was/is a mess and I couldn’t understand what the concrete, achievable objectives were. Perhaps any reduction of US presence would appear to be a local (in time and/or space) disaster?
Sure:
Because Syria is a mess the US has not and probably cannot significantly improve. The biggest problem with Trump’s policy is that he isn’t actually withdrawing troops.
Two reasons:
First, if he contacted the proper people there would be leaks and pushback from the military. If you’re going to catch crap from powerful people for doing something, better to do it fast.
Second, the Kurds were always going to get sold out when the US left. Turkey and the Kurds seem to view each other as existential threats; modern Turkey and Kurdistan can’t exist at the same time. And, simply put, the Turks are more valuable than the Kurds. They’re a longstanding NATO ally and a major military power in the Middle East; they just have a lot more to offer the Americans than the Kurds possibly can.
There’s no way US policy is this rational, but the steelman is that the US gets nothing out of Syria so it’s leaving and it’s selling out a weak ally in favor of a strong ally.
I don’t claim any deep expertise here, but I imagine it’s going to be pretty hard getting local allies next time we need them, with this fresh in everyone’s minds. Indeed, we needed (and got) help from the Kurds for our own purposes for the last 15 years or so. Now that we no longer seem to need them, it looks like we have utterly sold them down the river.
I’m in favor of a much less interventionist foreign policy than we now have, but when we do intervene (and sometimes, we genuinely need to), it would be nice if we could get local allies who didn’t fully 100% expect us to screw them over in the end, and it would be nice if we could convince potentially-hostile powers that it is possible to make peace with us short of either being conquered or test firing a few nukes to let us know war will be unacceptably expensive. But our foreign policy over the last few years has probably made both of those ideas very hard to sell anyone on. We’ll be paying that bill for a long time, especially since we’re sure to continue with our usual violent, interventionist foreign policy. We’ll just be doing it with fewer allies and less ability to get anyone to agree to anything with us.
That’s where I’m at with this, too. I don’t want us to be in Syria, or lots of other places. But I’m really not a fan of screwing the Kurds like this.
To quote Daniel Larison:
Allies don’t sign up with you because they like you, they sign up with you because they share your goals. Local stringers will always be available whenever the US shows up with guns, money, and a grudge against the people they have a grudge against.
Not nearly so many of them if they know that you’re going to be gone next year, grudges unresolved and them left behind with “collaborator” tattooed across their forehead for the rest of their lives.
Given my biases, I would favor a non-interventionist foreign policy plus an invitation to any Kurds who want to come here to do so. That’s not a very satisfactory compensation for abandoning our allies, but it’s at least something.
@David, As I pointed out elsewhere, there’s over 45MM of them, so unless you have a plan for the yield from inviting over a third the population of Mexico, that may be a bit much in multiple ways
@John Schilling
If you try to go back to literally the same people you abandoned, sure, it’s going to go poorly. But go more than a couple hundred miles away and I don’t think that abandoning the kurds will meaningfully hurt our ability to recruit stringers anywhere elsewhere, much like like I don’t think our endless support of the Kabul regime helps.
Besides, it’s not like we haven’t thrown the kurds under a bus in the past, and they still signed up with us in syria, because their enemies were our enemies.
Unless beggars can’t be choosers.
Which basically describes the Kurds’ position. It was pretty obvious we were going to abandon them to their fate sooner or later, but what alternatives did they have?
So, this right here is false. The Kurds had a completely viable path towards existing safely.
All that the US/Kurds had to do was hold on long enough until Syria could re-coalesce as a functioning state. At that point, Turkey would have lost any justification for rolling across the border and the Kurds could have gone back to living in a mostly autonomous state. Look at how life existed for them before Syria collapsed.
So, the most pessimistic interpretation of this is that it takes Syria a while to get back on its feet, which means a thousand or so US special forces have to do tours in Syria over the next decade or so. By all accounts, it wasn’t an especially risky tour, so our cost is pretty minimal and we get to do right by our allies.
Will this happen before or after Somalia does so?
Even one dead American is too many for a benefit this small.
At that point, there are two options, US makes Syrian Kurdistan the 51st state, or the Kurds get curb stomped by Assad instead of Erdogan. I wouldn’t bet on the former.
I’ll admit I’m not an expert on the Turks and Kurds but a simple overview is that they’ve been murdering each other for 40+ years, with Turkey going so far as to bomb the Iraqi Kurds. By the time Syria stabilizes into a functional state, whenever that might be, there still won’t be peace between the Turks and the Kurds and I expect the US to sell out different Kurdish groups in the future for the exact same weak/strong ally reasons.
There was a potentially viable diplomatic solution where the Kurds agreed to rejoin Syria in exchange for relative autonomy. Would that have been the most stable political solution? maybe not; but there was a chance and hard work could have preserved it.
Now what do we have? The kurds were the security force in western syria. If they get wiped out, and Assad can’t control his western provinces; does Turkey plan to cover the entire Iraqi border?
I’m going to guess that approximately all of the American soldiers presently serving in Syria disagree with you on that point. In part because one of the benefits of doing right by our allies is that it saves thousands of Americans from dying in the next war. And in part because they are good and honorable men who understand what “ally” means.
There’s a plausible argument that it was foolish for the United States to ally with the Kurds in the first place, but we did and that comes with obligations. And with consequences if we don’t live up to the obligations.
@John Schilling
I am not against military action that I perceive as serving the interests of the United States.
I am against THIS military action, which @Aftagley describe as siting a thousand American soldiers for the next decade or so in an active war zone for a benefit that charts to me as essentially negligible.
If there is a substantial argument that going all-in to defend the Kurds would save thousands, I still haven’t seen it. We aren’t treaty allies with them, and we are with the Turks.
When choosing between two allies, going with the one you have an actual formal alliance with seems to me to be the right call. And I note that all the people angry that Trump was “threatening the stability of NATO” by implying that he wouldn’t defend countries that weren’t meeting the 2% baseline are silent when he backs an actual NATO ally.
You may be against this military action, but you are five years too late to not have this military action. You’ve got it.
And you’re not getting out of it, because that’s not what your man in the White House is doing. There’s still going to be two thousand American troops in Syria, pretending to fight ISIS, exposed to all the risks(*) associated with such. They’ll just be doing it without the ally that was actually fighting ISIS, and with the “ally” that will happily play Let’s You And Him Fight between the US (alone) and ISIS while they take out the Kurds. The negligible good that we were doing will be diminished, and the cost will increase.
Not getting involved in a war is one thing, and it’s often a good thing.
Quitting a war is a different thing, and it rarely ends well for the quitter.
Quitting a war impulsively, without warning your allies or your troops in the field or even your own generals, that’s just bafflingly stupid.
And not quitting a war, but selling out one of your allies anyway (impulsively, etc), do you really think that is either morally or practically equivalent to “I’m opposed to this military action and we shouldn’t get involved”?
This is basically Franklin Delano Trump saying, after D-day, “I’ve just got off the phone with Franco about some old grievance between Spain and Canada, and we think it was stupid to get involved in this silly European war in the first place, so we’re ordering our navy to stand aside and let the the Spanish hit Juno Beach with everything they’ve got”.
Well, it will save thousands of Kurdish lives at the very least. And nobody cares that the Kurds aren’t “treaty allies”. Nobody whose help we will need going forward is going to say, “well, they weren’t treaty allies, so we totally trust you not to screw us over like you did them”. Even Recep Erdogan isn’t going to trust the United States after this. He’s just going to use us while it lasts.
* Which, let’s be clear, are approximately zero, or perhaps less than zero. If my math is correct, the death rate among American soldiers in Syria has been lower than the death rate among American soldiers deployed at stateside bases. A few more bullets, but less driving and much less drinking and ISIS mostly can’t shoot straight anyway.
@John Schilling
That is a strong argument, and I appreciate it.
It is mostly not the argument that I have seen, so I will have to think on it a bit more.
@Aftagley says:
If you were a kurd, would you take that deal? I wouldn’t. Assad will spend several years violently suppressing many factions in Syria with extreme prejudice. When he finishes with them, why on earth wouldn’t you assume he will move on to the kurds?
And from the US perspective, any deal over kurdish autonomy would involve the US cutting a deal with Assad, whose price will include either complete US withdrawal or guarantees of Syrian territorial integrity. There’s no way to do that without looking like you’re getting in bed with someone covered in blood. The optics are terrible.
More of this, please.
(not directed at anyone in particular; just appreciating the acknowledgement of a potentially convincing counter argument)
Yes, but if your’e going down the backstabbing route, it should be carefully thought out and calculated, not as an impulsive decision following a phone call.
Granted, I’m sure he has more info to work with than I can see, but the Kurds constitute over 45MM people, and have been screwed over since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They outnumber Scots, Dutch, and Thais for context. By all rights they should have had an independent state by now (as far as it comes to rights, that is), and would be a lapdog if the US stayed loyal.
This wouldn’t be the first time people talked about standing up a formal Kurdistan. And also not the first time the counterargument would be something something nation building something something trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
That said, I wouldn’t mind revisiting the issue, even from the safety of our armchairs here.
@Paul on that point, I actually agree with other commenters that it shouldn’t be America’s business to nation-build.
Unfortunately, I think America has already propped up a quasi-state (as I’m doubtful much tax collection is going on in the areas occupied by Kurds).
Existing governments like Turkey will quash any attempts to form a formal state, which is why the Syrian area (and Iraq to a lesser extent) was a haven for them. Turkey, recognizing the threat, is attempting to quash beyond its borders, and the US military has been instructed to stand aside to let it happen when it had the power to stop it (who honestly thinks Turkey would have invaded were the US still there?).
I know this is totally a side point, but Thailand has a population close to 70mm. Perhaps you were thinking of Malaysia (pop around 30mm)?
In any case, I didn’t really understand why you chose those groups for comparison. The one I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, that I think is more salient is Israel, with population close to 9mm.
@jgr314, I’m going by this, which shows that actual Thais to be 31.1MM, with other ethnic groups a part of Thailand as well.
It’s actually quite interesting how many ethnic groups comprise countries I think are homogeneous blocks. But I suppose the Kurds aren’t the only ones without a country, just one of the biggest groups.
… “It will be super useful to my FSB bosses”.
Seriously, that is the best possible argument for it.
Even if you wanted to sell out the Kurds to do Turkey a favor, turning around and then publicly threatening Turkey completely wrecks that potential upside.
That’s pretty silly.
The best possible Steelman argument for it is “Donald Trump really dislikes seeing American boys come home in bodybags and doesn’t see a massive advantage for Americans in staying, since he views international politics as having no moral valence”
Well, by and large US servicemembers weren’t especially exposed to risk in Syria.
If his goal is “reduce US service member’s casualties” it’s also weird that THIS is the conflict he’s choosing to pull out of.
@Aftagley
Because this is the one he can get out of right now.
He’s been trying to pull out of Afghanistan too, but having less success because of the massive investment that we have there.
The Kurds were the ones in body bags and willing to do so. How do you feel about the US telling them to tear down fortifications because there’s an implicit guarantee of US protection and then announcing they’re on their own less than two months later?
If you’re an EU4 player, you know how valuable vassals and mercs are! The analogy is you cut yourself off from the mercenary market and take a diplo hit by ceding a territory you didn’t care much for. You could argue that it’s only a temporary cutoff but you better have some diplo and influence ideas!
@DragonMilk
I am an EU4 player! This is like pulling a guarantee from a minor you were interested in because your ally telegraphed that he was going to declare war and you didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of that war.
You’re mildly sad you lost the ability to get that, but losing a critical ally would have been worse.
Now, as for the removal of fortifications, that’s a bit of dirty pool, but it doesn’t seem like Trump directed that.
The problem here is that Trump has been loudly signaling “I REALLY WANT TO LEAVE” for months (Mattis left over it), but the lower level apparatchiks have been making guarantees on the ground assuming that was false.
It wasn’t false, and those lower level people are the betrayers, not Trump, who has been signaling this play for a long time.
@EchoChaos I knew you’re an EU4 player from other posts, so I’m gonna go full EU4 analogy, not sure which DLCs you own:
To me, this is like supporting the rebellion in a country which is the small ally of a rival which borders one of your own allies. Your ally is actually in a coalition against the rival, and has an expired reconquest claim on the rebel area, but those rebels are one of the largest rebel groups in their own country. The ally has a newly fabricated claim on the rebel area, which has forts.
For some reason, you have guaranteed your rival’s ally. You’d like to revoke it. But a decision comes up on whether to take an opinion hit from your own ally for keeping the guarantee or telling the rebels to dismantle forts and take a diplo hit.
I would choose the first and revoke the guarantee later given that the ally is already in a coalition. I’m more concerned about the diplo hit.
Bonus: I consider Trump a 1/3/1 leader who just dismissed a +2 military advisor and hasn’t really replaced him.
Wouldn’t Trump have to be 1/4/1 in a republic?
Could you elaborate? What are the benefits to Russia?
1. Propaganda. We look really bad on the world stage here, so it will be convenient for them to spin this into a narrative of US fecklessness.
2. The US served as a counterweight to Russian power in the region. Assad is closely aligned with Russia and (i don’t know any of the details here) it’s possible that US presence in the region could have been forstalling Russian adventurism in the region. This is a possible example.
3. Turkey may be a NATO ally, but they’ve been recently drifting close to Russia under Erdoen. Playing this forward – the Turks aren’t going to be popular in America for a while. I don’t forsee Turkey/US relations improving, which COULD lead to Russia picking off a NATO ally into their sphere.
That’s all just off the top of my head. I’ll post back if I think of any others.
I’m not sure it will be necessary for anyone to spin this as fecklessness. We’re not in the closet about our fecklessness, hiding it as a shameful secret. Instead, we’re marching at the front of the Feckless Pride Parade with a big smile on our faces.
According to the internet, it wasn’t a “withdrawal”. The US forces (I’ve read 50 or 150 in different places) were moved to a different part of Syria.
They didn’t come home, they were just re-positioned to a place that doesn’t interfere with a Turkish-led attack on the Kurds.
Is the conclusion that the US gets all the downside and none of the upside from this action?
This is my impression. This is why DoD people are so confused (at least according to press reports). The only result of this re-positioning is to enable the Turkish offensive.
To elaborate, you can argue that things as they stood weren’t sustainable, but why now? And since this is clearly something Turkey wanted, what do we get from Turkey for doing this? If you’re gonna sell out the Kurds, you should at least make sure you get paid.
What upside, exactly, do you think the US is getting in Syria?
Off the top of my head:
1. A motivated and reportedly skilled CT force in the region that we have relatively strong control over. It is unlikely any other force in the region will be able to integrate as closely or as capably with us as the Kurds were.
2. Security over a bunch of ISIS detainees that we can trust/oversee. Even the president has admitted this move will probably let a bunch of ISIS fighters go back out into the wind. (although he think’s they’ll “just” attack our NATO allies, so I guess that’s ok /s)
3. A general decrease in instability in the region. Less areas where people can hide out and plan attacks on other US forces in the area.
4. Deterrence to Russian adventurism in the region.
@cassander I assume this was directed at me?
As I wrote upthread, I don’t see what the US objectives are in Syria. Given the tone of your question, I suspect that this is a topic on which you and I agree.
The upside to which I was referring was benefit of the recent US action (which I struggle to name, for reason that follow). My (current) understanding is that no US assets will be leaving Syria, so the US doesn’t get the “bring the boys home” benefit. Hence why I am not sure it should be called a withdrawal.
The main other benefit I see mentioned by other commentors could have been improved goodwill with Turkey.
@cassander: Unfortunately we are there and still are there. I personally would prefer to have a pseudo-vassal state taking the blows than dedicate US forces though.
It’s not as if Turkey would actually attack were US troops still stationed there – what is the upside in stepping aside and letting your mercs get slaughtered?
If by “the region”, you mean north eastern syria, sure. But Why do we want a CT force in a region where we’re not really trying to do CT, in a country we have no plans to occupy, run by someone who isn’t our friend?
They’ll probably attack Assad.
Absolutely not. Our involvement is prolonging the war and making the chaos worse.
Russia hasn’t been deterred at all. They’re adventurering more in Syria than anywhere else in the world in the last 20 years, and show few signs of stopping.
@jgr314 says:
It’s moving troops from Syria to Iraq, in all likelihood.
@DragonMilk says:
I’d prefer not to have vassals inside the territorial boundaries of states we’re not friends with, aren’t at war with, and aren’t actively trying to undermine in a serious way.
the only way for the Syrian war to end now is victory for assad. We should stop doing things that interfere with letting that happen.
This would probably be it
Thanks, I thought that was a helpful perspective.
+1. The situation isn’t as simple as most articles have made it out to be. U.S. Presidents have “betrayed” some major part of the Kurds in each successive Administration going back to at least Clinton and Bush.
In this case, Trump seems to have chosen to no longer support a supposedly terrorist Kurdish group in order to avoid the risk of something between war and bad feelings with an actual official NATO ally, Turkey. That’s of course complicated by the fact that the Turkish leader isn’t that great and the Kurdish group was recently helpful in cleaning up our mutual enemies in Syria.
Personally, I wish more that some of the previous “betrayals” of the Kurds hadn’t happened and that after the conquest of Iraq our government had just bitten the bullet and partitioned the country along religious and ethnic lines. That would’ve done more to create internal stability in the region, but leaving an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan would’ve really upset Turkey.
Bite the bullet, invent a time machine and slap Syskes and Picot upsides their respective heads.
If US troops stayed in Rojava to keep the Turks and Syrians out, what’s the endgame there? Is the plan really to carve a Kurdish communist state out of Syria and just let it sit on the borders of Iraq and Turkey forever?
Turkey is a NATO Ally, we’re still occupying Iraq in the hopes of eventually withdrawing for real, and Iran is near to becoming a nuclear power. A US-backed Kurdish state in Syria would destabilize all three, possibly losing us one of the few useful NATO member states and dragging us into a war with Iran. Not to mention dragging out the war in Syria indefinitely.
I don’t even see the upside here. Are we that eager to spread communism that we’ll throw away allies and endanger the lives of our own troops to do it? Are the Kurds such great allies that they’re worth invading and occupying the entire middle east, from Istanbul to Kabul, on order to support them? Or maybe the endless occupation is a good in its own right, a twisted form of economic stimulus?
Can you provide some details about how US troops in NE Syria “spread communism”? There are definitely Kurdish factions that are leftist; are the Kurds in NE Syria leftist? Kurds in Iraq seem to have been reasonably centrist, as the middle east goes. Kurds in Turkey include some terrorists; what is their left/right alignment.
There are no governments that qualify as democratic in the vicinity. Turkey is drifting toward autocracy and sectarianism, and most of the other governments in the area are autocratic and sectarian. As a NATO member (which is nonetheless cozying up to Russia) Turkey is one of the less bad ones, but the trend is negative.
Kurds have the problem that they are an ethnicity that is spread among three countries, all of whom are hostile to Kurds. The obvious solution of creating a Kurdish state in parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran is pretty unlikely. The semi-autonomous region in Iraq is the closest we have come to that, and it works reasonably well but probably can’t survive long-term.
Syria is a problem that could have been prevented if the US had taken the lead in pushing out Assad Jr. That ship sailed a long time ago, though. Syria is going to be a mess for many years to come. The Russians mostly created the mess, having learned nothing in Afghanistan. The US was totally feckless, and continues to be. It is probably better that we leave. Russia will spend tons of money and lives and it still won’t be fixed.
Not all problems in the world are caused by the US, and not all are solvable by the US.
The Rojava follows the communist ideology of “Uncle” Abdullah Öcalan, a leader in the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The primary militia of Rojava, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), explicitly follow this ideology and are directly supported by the US. The Turks claim that their ties to the PKK are more direct, but obviously that’s disputed.
Seriously, take a look at their ideology. “Democratic confederalism” literally involves outlawing private property and setting up local soviets to manage the economy. They even fly red fucking flags, it’s unreal how much of a shit they don’t give about hiding their intentions.
The mainstream media goes out of it’s way to avoid calling attention to the fact that we’re funding literal communist guerrillas, but it’s all out in the open.
Amen. So let’s get the hell out of the way, these tribal grudges are none of our business.
I guess the good news is that when you’re funding a communist militia, at least you can be pretty sure it’s not actually a hardcore fundamentalist Muslim militia disguised as “moderates.”
So, this generally matches my worldview and preferences on when/where we should get involved (basically never), but given that we were involved my opinion on our behavior changes. Convincing them to reduce defenses and then bailing is a kind of double-cross setup I just can’t get behind. Pretty low.
Still a better
love story than Twilightregime than ErdoganPick your poison. 45MM Kurds are spread out of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, half of which are in Turkey. Oppressed people will often have leftist leanings.
…and the US *already* chose to support them. You can choose to eventually ditch them in a calculated manner, but if you’ve already stuck your nose into someone else’s business, this is like stepping two feet two the left of an explosion rather than getting fully out of the way.
@DragonMilk,
If you want to fight in the great Kurdish revolution, knock yourself out. I’m sure that you can afford a plane ticket and it’s not like guns are hard to get in this country. By all means, commit your own life and your own money to the cause.
Just don’t drag the rest of us along for the ride. The 350MM people in America have spent enough on nation-building as it is.
@Nabil
Last I check the Kurds have never asked for US help in establishing an actual state or soldiers to fight alongside them. Do you think the $880bn has been more wisely spent elsewhere in Iraq/Syria?
There’s a difference between choosing not to support a potential ally and backstabbing an existing one.
The Rojava Kurds are leftist but they are not Communist in the USSR sense. Ocalan’s philosophy is closest to Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology.
In the context of the Middle East the Rojava Kurds are by far the closest (other than Israel) to Western liberal values, they are secular, they support equality for women etc.
From Wikipedia:
Öcalan fashioned his ideal society of “democratic confederalism”.
Democratic confederalism is a “system of popularly elected administrative councils, allowing local communities to exercise autonomous control over their assets, while linking to other communities via a network of confederal councils.” Decisions are made by communes in each neighborhood, village, or city. All are welcome to partake in the communal councils, but political participation is not mandated. There is no private property, but rather “ownership by use, which grants individuals usage rights to the buildings, land, and infrastructure, but not the right to sell and buy on the market or convert them private enterprises.” The economy is in the hands of the communal councils, and is thus (in the words of Bookchin) ‘neither collectivised nor privatised, it is common. Feminism, ecology and direct democracy are essential in democratic confederalism.
With his 2005 “Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan”, Öcalan advocated for a Kurdish implementation of Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom via municipal assemblies as a democratic confederation of Kurdish communities beyond the state borders of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Öcalan promoted a platform of shared values: environmental defense, self-defense, gender equality, and pluralistic tolerance for religion, politics, and culture. While some of his followers questioned Öcalan’s conversion from Marxism-Leninism, the PKK adopted Öcalan’s proposal and began to form assemblies.”
Now keep in mind that they have needed to find a political system that will give them autonomy in a situation in which they cannot make their own state, so Municipal federalism seems an understandable choice.
They are secular, pluralistic (For example they integrated numerous minorities and local Arabs to the SDF), believe in equality to women and in democracy. In the context of the Middle East, they are as close to western liberal values as it gets.
Turns out the most realistic part of Metal Gear Solid was Sniper Wolf.
I recall seeing plenty of articles fawning over the dreamy Kurdish socialists and the New Society they would bring to the Middle East. Democratic confederalism was a leftist applause light, at least for a little while.
>Kurds have the problem that they are an ethnicity that is spread among three countries, all of whom are hostile to Kurds.
Isn’t it four?
Anyway, i just realized the striking similarity to Polish situation after the partitions. Though it was actually different, for decades the partitioners cooperated among themselves in that particular matter.
Any reference for the Kurds being communists? I hadn’t heard that one before.
See my comment above.
Note Iraqi Kurdistan is pretty much free-market, broadly nationalistic. The Syrian Kurds though are notably Communist, although the two groups seem to work together happily enough.
I don’t think (as many) people would take issue or be concerned if we had pulled out without encouraging the Kurds to dismantle fortifications first. It is the combination, not just the act of withdrawing (or relocating) itself.
Yes, I’m miffed about the betrayal, not the withdrawal.
I’d tell the Kurds to harden their defenses, not dismantle them. If you want to pull out your troops do so and don’t announce it. Instead you’re relocating them and framing it as a withdrawal and blurting out that they didn’t help in WW2
I haven’t seen any indication that Trump directed the fortification dismantling. Every article I have seen puts it as mil-mil cooperation.
Basically the lower level people were writing checks expecting the White House to sign them even though Trump has wanted to get out forever.
So if he was planning to pull out, then he should have been giving direction to the military consonant with that to not leave our allies in the lurch. Servicemembers aren’t mind-readers, or they’d probably be doing something a lot more lucrative. Otherwise, projecting that we’re going to be proceeding as we have been is a reasonable course of action for his subordinates to take.
@CatCube:
+1
If the limo driver is going north on the interstate, jumping into the front seat and yanking the wheel until you are pointed south isn’t excusable simply because you have been complaining about the traffic.
Given the instability of the region, it’s better to have a loyal quasi-state backed by the an implicit US guarantee of air support and arms than to commit actual US lives. There’s over 45MM Kurds. They would be the ones doing the “occupying” as they are already there. With their help, you could pull your own troops out and just establish bases in their areas.
I’m fairly confident that lapdogs will not be diametrically be opposed to the values/ethics of the benefactor. Those betrayed are a different story.
So you’re suggesting that we provide arms and air support in a bizarre quasi-imperialistic war against not just Syria but also the regime we literally just installed in Iraq, our NATO ally Turkey, and a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran?
The stupidity of sending air support from our air bases in Turkey in order to bomb Turkey and fighting against an Iraqi military we just trained and equipped is absolutely mind-boggling. As is the idea that this somehow wouldn’t become a quagmire spreading from the Bosphorus to the Hindu-Kush that would flood our European allies with tens of millions more refugees.
And the end goal is, what, to replace American bases in Turkey with American bases in Kurdistan? That’s not even realpolitik, it’s just bloodthirsty idiocy.
No, last I checked the US has spent nearly $880bn in Iraq & Syria to:
1. Haphazardly set up a corrupt Shia “democracy” that dismantled much of the existing bureaucratic apparatus and froze out the Sunnis, laying the groundwork for ISIS
2. Commit more US soldiers and lives and then hitting on the bright idea of once again partner with the Kurds to use their bodies instead of US ones
3. In effect already establish the Kurdish quasi-state and advise them to dismantle fortifications as a gesture of goodwill to Turkey and the already implicit guarantee of arms and air support.
4. Do an about face and not withdraw, but stand aside and let the recent allies fight a doomed resistance against Turkey based on a single phone call.
The idea that this somehow wasn’t already a quagmire spread out from the Bosphorus to the Hindu-Kush that already flooded Europe with millions of refugees is absolutely mind-boggling.
And the end goal is to actually back out of the region with what already is a Kurdish quasi-state that we had chosen to support despite knowing their communist leanings. The die had already been cast. The follow-up has been pure back-stabbing.
I’m not going to argue that Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t been expensive and insane boondoggles. Afghanistan should have been a quick punitive expedition to kill Osama bin Laden and GTFO, while the Iraq war never should have happened. In either case, sticking around for nearly two decades has been a disaster and we can’t leave soon enough for my liking.
But your reasoning is no better than that of the Bush administration. Just because we’ve had two decades of pointless wars doesn’t mean that we need to spend the rest of the 21st century babysitting communist and islamist maniacs in the middle east. If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, step one to getting out is to stop digging deeper.
Point of order: they’re not communists. They are libertarian socialists/communalists.
Have any of their implementations of their economic philosophy offended you? AFAIK they recognize private property and respect individual rights, just have a society based around communal production of goods and communal representation.
Fair enough – we’ll see how much money is spent in on these conflicts over the next decade.
To me the Kurds were one of the most effective uses of money that was being spent anyway and functioned as mercenaries to prevent actual American bloodshed.
@Aftagley,
Sure, and if you buy that I’ve got a lovely bridge to sell you.
We’ve had more than a century’s worth of experience with revolutionary socialism. We know how this ends: either they get secure enough to start racking up megadeaths or someone else crushes them first.
@Nabil
What makes you think Kurds necessarily lean communist inherently? To your point, there’s no question the PKK leans that way. In my understanding, though, they as a people are more held together by the legacy of Saladin than Marx.
@DragonMilk,
Nobody is inherently communist, Kurds included.
The specific organizations we’re talking about, the People’s Protection Units in Syria and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, are communist. In a very literal sense where they fly red flags and organize soviets to plan all economic activity in the cantons they control. So far no de-Kulakization yet, at least not that’s been reported in the western press.
Isn’t the actual Kurdish “quasi-state” the one in northern Iraq? The one in Syria really isn’t even a quasi-state; it is an army that controls a border region between Turkey and Syria. We support it in the sense that it’s an army that is opposed to Assad and is possibly the only thing preventing Assad from doing more massacres.
If there is a Kurdish entity we actually support it’s the one in northern Iraq.
Have I missed something?
There is no group that can claim sovereignty over 45 million Kurds, and trying to create one would instantly start a war with Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. One that the Kurds would lose without massive US support, including ground troops, and one that would create a land-locked Kurdish state with no national unifying institutions. Hell, Iraqi Kurdistan has an economic blockade on the Kurds we are giving weapons to, at least if Wiki is correct, so what makes you think there is a single Kurdish entity you can even appeal to?
YPG is a limited player, only really useful in Syria, and backing them costs political capital with other Middle Eastern nations. The end-game on this involves a peace process the US already clearly signaled it wanted no part of, at least under this administration.
Assuming that the US government views invasion and occupation as a terminal goal goes a long way to understanding its behavior.
I would like to question what we would do if we kept supporting the Kurds while Turkey engages in all-out war with them.
I suppose a small benefit to the US in that situation is the expulsion of Turkey from NATO. But that is as far as benefits would go.
Benefit?
The Straits of Bosphorus has been one of the most geopolitically important places in the World since the Bronze Age.
It’s what’s standing between the Black Sea Fleet and everybody else.
Turkey is a larger geopolitical threat to the US today than Russia is though. Particularly any Russian naval assets, which are sad.
Please expand on that. It’s so off-base that it would be interesting to see what you actually are saying. Turkey is not trying to undermine democratic governments all over the world. Turkey has no nukes. Turkey (AFAIK) does not have a dedicated army of internet hackers attacking soft targets in the US and EU. Turkey does not have outrageous territorial claims against its neighbors. Turkey does not control gas distribution to multiple EU countries. Etc.
Turkey works very hard to control their diaspora and discourages them from integrating into their new societies, which some see as undermining those countries.
So just as a primer I’d rank threats as
1. China
2. Radical Islam
3. Impoverished refugeeism
4. Russia
Turkey is a major contributor to #2 & 3, and is openly hostile on both.
As for your statements, I think a few are pretty false.
IMO quite false. They are implicated by the Mueller investigation, even though he was pretty incompetent at running down side quests.
Prolly not true, but even if true their breakout time is probably less than a year.
An unknown, but probably not true.
/S?
They run incursions against their neighbors regularly under the guise of “counter-terrorism” that looks exactly like what Russia did in Crimea.
True. They do control many important shipping lanes though.
Also what aapje said.
Turkey wouldn’t go to all-out war if we were to keep supporting them. the US’ betrayal is the only thing that afforded them the opportunity to fulfill their desire
Jennifer Griffin, national security correspondent for Fox News posted a twitter thread about talking with a special forces soldier who was serving alongside the SDF.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182053870744276993.html
That’s depressing.
My reaction to this is “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” A President pulling out of a single theater of the Forever War is well above my expectations and significantly raises my (dismal) opinion of Trump. Sure, this sucks for the Kurds, but I’m not convinced that any sort of “orderly withdrawal” of US forces is politically possible under any plausible administration. If the Afghanistan War was a person, it would be old enough to join the Army and be sent to Afghanistan.
If Trump can steal a march on the Deep State, this is exactly the area in which I want him to do it.
I’d applaud pulling out of a lot of places, too, but as I understand things, we’re not actually pulling out of Syria–instead, we’re letting the Turks massacre our former allies while we stand by, still in Syria. Presumably we’ll still be there in a year, just with fewer allies and nobody willing to trust any promises we make.
More broadly, I’m in favor of withdrawing our troops from many places in the world where they are now, notably Afghanistan. But you can’t do that on the spur of the moment without triggering a lot of instability you don’t want. You need to plan things out and keep your allies in the loop so they can also come out of things as well as possible.
This goes alongside the initial invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, and the withdrawal of the US from the Iran deal as another foreign policy move that seems to me to be self-sabotage. Every future intervention (which we will surely make, whatever I want) will be made harder and more expensive and less likely to turn out well by these godawful decisions.
I question the assumption you’re making that a planned, orderly withdrawal is possible. My model of reality suggests that events will mysteriously conspire to prevent this from ever happening, and I see no reason to believe that American forces will leave Afghanistan any time in the next 18 years, for example. “Hasty withdrawal with lots of collateral damage” and “no withdrawal ever” may in fact be our only options.
Maybe, but what we have now is still in the “no withdrawal ever” section, and with the added bonus of hanging what had been our allies out to dry at the hands of someone who is theoretically a better/more important ally.
There’s a ton of twentieth-century philosophy on this point, which concerns specifically the question of what “proper names” might mean and how they are different from predicates. See wikipedia articules on: “Descriptivist Theory of Names” “Naming and Necessity” (Kripke), “Rigid designator”, “Sense and Reference” (Frege) just to get you started.
I think a shallow answer to this question might be: Being Greek is just a predicate. Being being Socrates perhaps is likewise (or perhaps corresponds to a bunch of attributes/predicates that pick him out). But surely we can have a linguistic convention that when we use the proper name form, we are also implying existence and uniqueness, and when we don’t use a proper name there’s no such implication. But this is merely convention, and we could choose otherwise; there’s nothing interesting going on here.
I don’t know enough to be unhappy with the shallow answer!
But the philosophical debates were not so shallow, and in particular there are suggestions that singular names are/can be a different type of entity entirely (e.g. a “rigid designator”) not reducible to one or a bunch of predicates, whether or not existence of exactly one satisfying instance is also implied. I have never understood enough to find this forcefully compelling.
Some of the arguments for names being special can be prompted by asking: what are we doing when we use the name for someone that doesn’t exist? What about discussing someone we genuinely think exist but doesn’t really? What are we doing if we ask “What would the world be like if Socrates were a woman?” – if being male is part of the very definition of Socrates-ness this question makes no sense, but it seems sensible enough on its face. If someone has two proper names by which they are known, do these two actually mean the same thing?
Nominative determinism: two of the most important names associated with the revelations around forced organ harvesting in China are… Kilgour and Gutmann (Content warning: viscerally disturbing). This is so on-the-nose that I’m having a hard time processing it.
Still somewhat new here, and particularly impressed by seeing indications that people actually changed their minds because of rational arguments – something that I previously thought never happened except for some scientists some of the time. Curious to hear specific examples – anyone care to share a story of why they changed their opinions about a hot-button, CW, tribal issue?
To clarify – I’m not interested in having a rational argument about any particular issue, I’m curious what issue you changed their mind about and why.
A few years ago, I argued on this blog with someone on global warming, skeptical that it was really something to be worried about. I’m much more concerned now. Back around 2014 or so, it looked to me like global warming had paused and I got in to a few arguments with someone about it. Now in 2019, it’s pretty clear that there is no pause and while I don’t think we should go insane in our response to it, it should be taken seriously.
I’ve changed my mind about a few CW issues, but in general the changes tend to be from having strongly lined up on one side of them to now being quite absolutely or relatively agnostic about them. In some cases this is paired with also no longer caring much about them.
I think my mind was changed partly by being exposed to people “on the other side” who were clearly smarter than me and had arguments I could not find convincing refutations for, or else who were clearly starting from different irreducable values.
The other part was I became much more comfortable not having an opinion.
I have changed on several hot-button CW topics since my headstrong youth. Mostly from conservative to reactionary, which can look similar to outsiders.
In order:
I am now strongly against free trade. This predates Trump by a substantial margin, interestingly. I first got it from reading Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What should replace it and why by Ian Fletcher.
I am substantially less pro-war. I supported the Iraq War and signed up for the military. I am now mostly anti-foreign intervention. Fool me once.
I am more convinced that global warming is actually happening and human caused. I was a full-on denier about 10 years ago, but now I’m neutral to leaning convinced. I disagree with the left about what should be done, but I am massively reducing my own carbon footprint as much as I can.
I am substantially more nationalist than I was when I was young.
The real issue, in my opinion, is not whether it is happening and human caused, is it whether the effects are large and negative. That’s a much harder claim to support, which explains why people on one side of the argument focus on the causation issue, but not why those on the other side do.
I don’t know how CW this is, but I’ve become rather more skeptical about UBI after reading the discussions about it here. I like the idea in principle, but worry that what we’ll get if we implement it won’t look much like the ideal–it could easily end up as one more in a long list of welfare programs that can’t ever go away.
Over the course of a couple years (quite awhile ago), I changed from thinking civil partnerships for gay couples would be a good policy (and leave “marriage” alone as a symbolic sop to traditionalists) to thinking they needed to be able to get legally married. This was largely from seeing arguments about how much existing law and custom and policy was bound up in legal marriage.
I’ve been in favor of a noninterventionist foreign policy for my whole life, but I’ve become a little more skeptical of how well that will work from reading/listening to people who know a lot about current foreign policy. I worry now that pulling back from a world policeman role will encourage other powers to step up, and eventually will lead to major wars; I also worry that going from a world where the US military is unambiguously dominant to one where China could plausibly win a war with us is likely to lead us into that war sooner or later. OTOH, it sure seems like we make a hash of it most of the time when we try to play world policeman, so I’m not sure what the right policy approach is.
I became much more comfortable with some kind of welfare programs and some level of paternalistic laws after reading _The Bell Curve_ and reflecting on its contents. The more I’ve thought about that, and understood the impact of the intelligence distribution on the world, the more I’ve seen reasons to moderate my previous view that people should be smart enough and wise enough to avoid trouble themselves. OTOH, as with foreign policy, when we do welfare programs and paternalistic laws, we often make a hash of it, so again I don’t know exactly what the right policy is, here. UBI is appealing to me precisely because it seems like it might be simple enough that we wouldn’t f–k it up too much.
Over the last few years, I’ve become a lot more in favor of social norms and to some very limited extent even laws/policies that encourage a traditional family structure–marry relatively young, raise a couple kids, grow old together. I don’t want to force anyone into that structure, because some people just can’t be happy there. But I strongly suspect that most people would have happier lives in some variant of that structure than outside it.
Reading some alt-right-ish sites led me to realize that there are some pretty serious issues with immigration. Twenty years ago, I favored open borders; at this point, I favor something more like the Canadian system. The US has done really well from immigration in the past, and we’re historically great at assimilating immigrants, but we probably should be selecting immigrants to benefit our country, and it’s utterly nuts to have a 10-12 million person population of people permanently living here illegally.
I used to only support local charities, and especially focus on volunteering for causes I supported. Reading Scotts’s Charity articles, and then the information published by effective altruism organizations persuaded me that existential risk is of such paramount importance, that based on my values, it dwarfs all other causes I had previously donated to, with the possible exception of my church. I now divide my charity money equally between my church and increasing bio security, while pursuing a career that has the potential to improve bio security.
The other position I change my mind on was being pro gay marriage, but that happened mainly because I met open gay people and learned more about them.
I read a bunch of Ayn Rand material. I become an atheist and gun-rights proponent as a result.
The rules are try to be necessary, kind, and true, but you only need two of those qualities. Since you are directly responding to a question, your response is necessary, true is always hard one with opinions, so just make sure your response is kind and you will be fine. You are also not supposed to talk about culture war topics on visible open threads, but this one is hidden, so you are fine. There are a couple topics that Scott wants to have people avoid, but just alluding to them won’t cause bans, he just wants o avoid entire threads dedicated to discussing them. You can see them if you click the comments tab at the top of the page.
I’m less anti-socialist, though, like Atlas, it’s more of me being less strongly opposed then fully on the other side. I used to be of the camp that socialized medicine would destroy innovation and lead to mass rationing and discontent. But Europeans do seem to genuinely like their respective set-ups, and see a compassionate case for significant reforms to the medical system here, and have no real expertise to evaluate what those should be. I still expect lots of complications and unintended consequences from any kind change to America, especially given it’s scale and diversity, but can see the arguments on the other side have merit. (This is the kind of thing Federalism would be good for, still convinced of that).
I think I’m mostly convinced that Climate Change is a genuine threat do to being in different sources than when I was younger. I still don’t expect catastrophe and I don’t expect much improvement from any non-global conservation plan, so I largely take a ‘don’t over-react’ position, but I have more respect for the those worried about it.
I’ll cop to being formerly reluctantly in favor of the invasion Iraq, buying into the strange mix of idealism and realpolitik in the neocon line of using it to bring stability to the region and being morally justified by Saddam’s human rights abuses.
Occasionally I’ll poke some of my other contrarian/regressive positions, but they seem to holding.
I can think of several major ones for which I’ve changed my views, but I’m struggling to think of one that I changed within the last ten years. I suppose I’ve changed prioritization of certain things and confidence levels, but not necessarily positions per se.
One of the last positions I remember changing was my opinion toward the death penalty. Looking back now I can’t even really return the mindset of believing we should have it. I changed it because it became obvious to me that all of reasons I had to distrust state authority and competence combined to provide a pretty compelling argument that the state should never have that power. I think that pro-death penalty folks get caught up in the idea that the worst criminals “deserve” death. I realized that, in the words of William Munny, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Certain topics are not to be referred to by name, so as to keep the search engine robots from making unfortunate associations. I believe you’re trying to mention what people here usually call Horrible Banned Discourse. Since we’re on a hidden thread, you’re probably fine as long as you don’t mention it by name or go off on a racist tirade. Like aristides says, [true / kind / necessary]: pick at least two.
The Damore and Persky cases (as well as leaving the Google echo chamber and reading SSC in general) did a lot to convince me that the left has gone too far on CW issues. Of course, I still wouldn’t dream of voting Republican on anything important, but I no longer identify as a liberal either.
Overall though, my experience is similar to that reported by Well… Reading the comments on SSC exposed me for the first time to opposing arguments that aren’t completely insane. It didn’t cause me to dramatically do a 180 on anything, but I’m less certain and opinionated about many things and more aware that the other side aren’t always cartoon supervillians.
@Dino >
Off the top of my head:
1) 15 years ago I thought that gay legal marriage in California was a niche issue and having it would tick off more folks than it made happy and was a distraction, but it now looks like more seem to like it being legal than don’t so I was wrong.
2) Ten years ago I thought global warming was coming and efforts to resist it (more nuclear and natural gas, less coal and oil, et cetera) should be done, now I think it’s just too damn late, recent summers have been way too damn hot, geo-engineering is needed to make San Francisco have San Franciscan (instead of San Josean) weather again.
3) I still want the Voting Rights Act strongly enforced, but in reading how well African-American “returnees” are doing in the ‘new south’ and more than I used to I think it’s now safe to let ‘States Rights’ be a thing again without much risk of the return of Jim Crow.
4) I thought that the passage of the ACA waa just about the only legislative progress in the last 40 years, but even though they have less poverty than California so easiet for them, that Massachusetts did something similar before on their own makes me suspect that stuff like that should just be a State by State thing, and maybe the Federal government should just be an old age insurance program with a Coast Guard and Post Office, and otherwise California and the rest should just govern themselves.
5) Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party can change what they stand for far faster than I thought they would.
6) My most (social) conservative view was that the parents of minors should be discouraged from divorcing, and comments here have mostly convinced men that it’s impossible to make any laws that may effectively discourage their parents from divorcing without also hurting the kids, so no hope there.
Given my “political” history I strongly suspect that I’ve changed on more stuff than that, but I think me memory falsely ret-cons my beliefs in a “We have always been at war with Eurasia” way because: For lack of a better term I’ll call my parents political leanings during most of my childhood political las “Trotskyists” though my Mom went “bourgeoisie” fast when she had a chance to, and my Dad may have been even better described as a “batshit crazy anarchist/wannabe rebel”, my step dad (who my Mom statted dating when I was about ten years old) in contrast to them was a moderate, my mother’s father was a Republican (and also a U.S. Army Air Corps veteran, and the most patriotic man I’ve known), my mother’s mother didn’t speak on politics until her husband died, after which she said she really like Joe Biden and didn’t like Palin (so I presume probably Republican and then a Democrat as a widow), I never met my other grandfather, my father’s mother was intensely Catholic and probably a Democrat, but according to my Dad either her brother or my father’ father’s brother was some flavor of Communist in the “30’s.
In Junior High School (1980-’81, and I was 12, I think it’s called “Middle School” now) I was voterd “Most Patriotic” for the yearbook, and in 1983 I was in the “Young Republicans” club at my High School, even so in 1984 I was at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco (my Mom worked as a secretary at The New York Times San Francisco bureau at the time) and I renember that Walter Mondale’s speech moved me to tears (something about helping “the least among us”), so I presume that I was a Democrat then, though I do remember nodding a lot when anarchist girls talked to me in my late teens and very early 20’s but whether I actually agreed with them or just thought they were cute I can’t be sure of.
By the dawn of the 21st century I was a registered Republican, which didn’t last as before the decade was out I was registered third party (which I will not name as given the amount of self “docking” I do here doing so would make it too easy to find my name), but after Pelosi got the ACA passed I registered as a Democrat.
The thng is I don’t remember my opinions on any “hot button” issues being different in all those years, but they must’ve been otherwise my Party affiliations wouldn’t have changed during those times.
I’ve become more radical in ideals, more moderate in methods, and more uncertain (sometimes militantly uncertain) in some empirical beliefs.
As we’ve had more opportunities to observe how populists, nationalists, and traditionalists behave in power I have become more anti-{populist,nationalist,traditionalist}, more convinced that cosmopolitan secular globalism is the correct moral worldview, and more convinced that when liberalism and democracy conflict, democracy should yield. I believe more strongly than before, for example, that defending the rights of peaceful people to cross borders freely is more important than respecting the wishes of anti-immigrant voting majorities.
On the other hand, I have also become more of a mistake theorist vs a conflict theorist; more aware that my views are weird (and WEIRD) and that many decent, well-informed, intelligent people of goodwill disagree strongly with them; and more friendly to finding incremental steps toward a better world and second-best keyhole-solutions, vs insisting on radical principles. This blog has certainly influenced those shifts.
This blog has also made me more convinced that, on many hot button issues around group differences and their sources, both “sides” are tremendously overconfident in their assertions.
Maybe this is just a mental bias / hobby-horse of mine, but in terms of asset diversification I think people in the first-world above the 50th income percentile are massively underinvested in food to deal with tail risks.
Since there are varieties of freeze-dried food stored in plastic bags filled with nitrogen that can last at least 15 years (and probably more like 25 for some branded) that cost ~$15 USD per person per day for complete nutrition, having a year’s worth of food stored per family member costs $5,500 / person, and is one of the only *real* economic diversifications in the case of {electrical grid collapse, nuclear war, civil war, Venezuela-level self-inflicted economic disaster, or winter caused by volcanic eruption*}.
At $1,500 per year for a family of 4 [$5,500*4 / 15], maintaining a year’s supply of food is a nearly trivial expense, but almost no-one does it. It’s actually even cheaper if you commit to eating, say 1/10th of your meals in a year from your stockpile.
Do people here think this is a rational-but-socially-forgotten-behavior because the tail risk hasn’t hit in 2 centuries? Or am I misaligned on something?
*This last one is the case that made this a lowkey obsession of mine. The 1816 Year Without A Summer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer) was the last major volcanic eruption causing crop failure, and is believed to be one of the reasons why the Mormon religion (founded by someone who lived through it) has as a major piece of doctrine that each LDS family must has 1 year of food stored.
Ag is much more advanced now, farmers would just plant faster-growing crops and farm more intensely to minimize waste. If that isn’t enough, we’d slaughter animals and eat the 36% of the corn crop used as animal feed:
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/livestock-feed-and-habitat-destruction/
If that’s not enough, we’d stop exporting, if that’s not enough, we’d buy up crops from the third world.
I don’t think faster growing crops would balance out a year where there is frost for 5 nights in a row in June in New Jersey.
Agriculture being more advanced is a double edged sword. We have a lot more tools in the toolchest, but we are already getting a much higher yield per acre that could be ‘fragile’ to massively changed conditions, and our genetic variation in our seedstock is lower.
I think it would take an extraordinarily unlikely confluence of events for the quantity of food I have stockpiled to be the bottleneck in my survival.
Survival, sure, but what about malnutrition / significant financial cost of acquiring enough food? Note the average weight loss in Venezuela, as a reference.
The United States isn’t Venezuela. If highly skilled workers in the United States can’t earn enough to buy sufficient calories, the entire global economy is fucked, there’s almost certainly civil unrest, and probably wars. I don’t expect to do well under such circumstances, canned goods or no.
(BTW I know several Venezuelans not in Venezuela that are doing just fine. Me, but in Venezuela when things started getting really bad, likely would have had that option.)
Imagine, say, the whole North American power grid goes down for a couple months after a large solar flare. Having food around could be lifesaving in that type of disaster.
If there’s no electricity, I’m not going to be able to continue to live 30 stories up. So where are me and my year’s worth of food going to ride out the storm?
Why not? It’s not like you’ll have to go out to get to your programming job every day.
Anyway, 30 stories isn’t an impossible climb, just unpleasant if you’re not used to it. (Assuming you’re generally able-bodied, which I think from your weight-lifting posts that you are.)
I guess I could hunker down in there. But I’d need to leave regularly to get water and I’m not sure what the ingress situation would be with the doormen presumably gone. And I’d have to avoid getting robbed or killed.
The bottom line is that I think in any disaster either the powers that be would have to restore order and form camps within a week or two or I’d be fucked regardless of prepping (leaving aside rearranging my whole life around it).
So I guess that argues for keeping two weeks worth of supplies on hand. Even that feels not worth it.
My sense is that there’s a kind of exponential diminishing return to number of days of supplies you have on hand. Having a few days of medicine and food is a pretty big win, because it will pay off as soon as there’s a bad snowstorm and the roads are impassable for a couple days, or you get a stomach bug and can’t leave the house for a couple days. A few days worth of drinking water covers the day when the water main has broken and the water’s out till the utility crew can fix it. And so on[1].
Going from that to, say, two weeks of supplies covers a larger range of potential problems, but they’re much less likely. Bad weather that makes it a big pain in the ass to go to the store for a few days is commonplace. Bad weather that makes it a big pain in the ass to go to the store for two weeks is a lot more rare. It can happen, but it’s less likely to happen.
Move on to six months of supplies, and you’re looking at really unlikely and awful disasters–a gigantic earthquake or widespread civil disorder or pandemic flu or something. If one of those happens, you’ll be glad of the six months of supplies, but it’s really unlikely you’ll need them. (OTOH, for most people, six months of supplies wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive in terms of money or space, so maybe it’s cheap insurance.)
And so on. At the extreme end, you’ve moved to a defensible home way out in the countryside with a generator and a well and like-minded neighbors and a plan in place for some massive disaster. You’re *really* well prepared for that kind of disaster–something like a total collapse of order, outbreak of civil war, or nuclear attack on the US–but you’ve paid a lot in terms of money and opportunity cost for your collapse-of-civilization insurance.
[1] For a suburb dweller like me, a lot of minimal disaster preparedness is stuff like keeping the gas tank at least half full and having a bit of cash at hand in case the ATMs get shut down for a few days when the big storm messes up the power lines. That plus making sure there’s no medicine you really need that you don’t have a week or two stash of, and that there’s enough food in your house that you won’t starve if you can’t get out for a week, and you’ve captured a lot of the available benefit of disaster prep at a small cost.
Very unlikely, but in the event that it happens your investment in food would appreciate tens or hundreds of thousands of percent.
I don’t think $1500 a year is a trivial expense for many people. And beyond that, there’s the question of storage, which could be a real problem, especially if you live in an apartment.
Not many people live in apartments in the US, but even in an apartment this would probably only take a closet or two.
As for $1500/year, note I did specify 50th percentile income. At that income point for the first world, finding $125 / month is pretty easy subject to slightly lifestyle preference modifications.
It depends on what you mean by “not many” but just under 1/5 of the US lives in an apartment or condo (I’m not sure if townhomes are counted in that or not, I’m inclined to say know since it specifically identified condos as separate from apartments).
I still $125 a month is a pretty big expense. There’s so many useful things I could do with that money that doesn’t involve me spending it on useless crap that only pays out for an incredibly minuscule possibility of some apocalyptic event while assuming nothing will happen to cause all my prep to be useless.
Yeah, $125 is not going to be an insubstantial part of your expandable budget on a month to month basis, which you could otherwise use to save, invest, or spend on leisure/entertainment. You have to go up to the 80th percentile or so for me to take that statement as true, and even then I wouldn’t consider it a good use of money (not that I begrudge anyone who does, but if the question is why don’t more people do it…)
I think you overestimate the number of closets in a typical apartment.
Yeah, generally you’re looking at a small linen closet and then one closet per bedroom. If you’re lucky one of those bedroom closets might be a walk-in but it isn’t a given. You also might have small outside storage room accessible from your porch/patio. But remember, you have to fit everything there. Bike(s), camping stuff, a grill, seasonal decorations, and various other random stuff that people tend to want to store all have to go there too.
Both.
Most of the ‘prepper stuff I’ve read or talked about sounds more like a hobby/LARP than actual preperation. For example, if SHTF then I’m probably a lot more concerned about water than food and I’d rather have a good bicycle than a years worth of food I can’t take with me.
Even the Red Cross falls into this. I’m not sure why my survival kit needs an “emergency blanket” when I have one, you know, on my bed or a photocopy of my driver’s license. It just sounds like a lot of stuff that’s going to sit in my garage and never get used and be too old/expired in any realistic scenario where I’d use it.
So yeah, a lot of the prepping stuff, even from reputable sources, doesn’t sound very realistic.
On the other hand, I think there is some real irrationality here.
If you look at the Red Cross link, the only thing they mention which I need to have or die is water and (maybe) medication. I can go buy a couple cases of bottled water from the Walmart for <$20 which gives me like 80% of the advantage of prepping with 99% less work. I don't do this, it's irrational, and I'm not sure why.
I guess there's stigma around prepping but the big thing is that even the best organizations don't come off as realistic. Like, they're prepping for a nuclear holocaust or something, while the biggest concern for the average poster here is the SF Bay Area getting hit by another big earthquake and the US government pulling another Katrina or Puerto Rico recovery. That’s a realistic tail risk where I can reasonably foresee what my needs will be.
The idea behind the emergency blanket is that it is small enough and light enough to carry in a small backpack. The primary time this would make sense is if someone has to evacuate on public transport or some other scenario where they are not allowed or able to take more with them. If you have your own place with a garage and vehicle, then yes, this is probably lower on your list of things to worry about.
Having water on hand is absolutely a good idea, and an obvious part of rational prepping. When I was getting my sister up to 2 week readiness since she lives in Vancouver (a region that could have a bad earthquake any day now that could sever roads for a few weeks), I did focus on food and water.
But longer term (past 2 weeks) water is pretty easy. You just stockpile iodine tablets and assume that if things persist you’ll have time to rig a rainfall catchment.
A year supply is “ideal”, in the sense that’s ideally all you’d ever need, but most everyone would be well-served by at least putting together a bag/backpack with a 72-hour kit. A few days of portable food, a couple of bottled waters and life-straw (10K gallons for $15 unless you live in an absolute desert), a poncho, some way to keep warm, basic first-aid kit, total cost $60-100 in a form you can grab and take with you as needed in the event of an earthquake/hurricane/tornado/whatever.
Start there, at least, and you might turn from an urgent need for help to someone who can ride out most issues, at least until outside help arrives.
The slow build-up of a longer term supply of foods you can rotate and eat as part of your normal meals (which minimizes waste) is also beneficial during simple events like losing your job, where you want to use your “savings” and minimize expenses, not just a total disaster.
In the event of a larger food-supply interrupting disaster, living next to orchards/fruit trees/farms/ranches, etc… is also a decent back-up plan. 🙂
You can also disinfect your rain water in the sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_disinfection
Food is very important for emergencies. If you imagine an emergency as having to lock your front door for 3 days until the riots pass then all you need is water/critical medicine, but if the emergency is going to force you from your home while trying to hump 3-5 gallons of water plus a few other things. You will end up hungry and tired and prone to poor decision making, and good decision making is #2 on the list of most important things to have in an emergency basically behind water + necessary medicine.
An emergency blanket isn’t a spare regular blanket, its a lightweight and highly reflective piece of material that can be easily stored and carried.
…What if I feel it is important not to be easily visible during this emergency? Can I get a non-reflective emergency blanket?
Yes, but they’re a bit heavier and bulkier and you can usually arrange to deploy your emergency blanket under some sort of cover. Your call whether that’s a need-to-have, nice-to-have, or not worth the bother.
Emergencies where rescue services are trying to save you are probably more likely than ones where folks are trying to kill you.
Fun fact: Ejector seat parachutes are orange, tan, olive green and light grey for camo in a variety of environments or visibility to rescuers.
Also, most emergency blankets I’ve ever seen that were shiny were shiny on one side, dull on the other.
@Paul Brinkley
Apparently that is a consequence of their design, where only one side is designed to reflect heat back. To stay warm, the shiny side goes to your body.
@Aapje:
> To stay warm, the shiny side goes to your body.
It isn’t obvious to me that having the shiny side in to retain heat is better than having the shiny side out to reduce emissivity. Searching, it seems that you are right that the manufacturers usually suggest reflective-inward. Most of the medical research papers I found don’t seem to mention this, and instead simply conclude that space blankets aren’t particularly effective for treating hypothermia.
This article though makes the counter-argument for reflective-out: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01738694/document
I’ve only skimmed it, but it uses this exact question as its example of how metacognition about physical processes works. It concludes (I don’t know how well to trust the math) that shiny-out is better if you are in a non-windy environment, and shiny-in is better if you are extremely windy. Most of the paper is about how students react to these arguments.
The most interesting part for this discussion might be Appendix 2, where the author does some “home experiments” that involve putting wrapped containers of water in the freezer and measuring the difference in temperature after a short period of time. In line with his calculations for the non-windy environment, he finds that having the shiny side out reduces heat loss significantly compared to shiny-in.
I dunno, I feel like I’d go full Jesus fast if there was no food and no way to get it.
Around how much space would that take up for one person? I imagine it’s around 200 lbs of food sans packaging, which I imagine taking up ~50 sq feet. You’d have to break it into at least 5 boxes if you ever planned to move it.
For anyone who doesn’t own a home with a basement, I think the practical considerations may get in the way of that. For example, people living in big cities.
$15 per day per person seems a very high cost? I’m not a “serious” prepper in any way, but I did get a couple of these buckets which have food at about $3 per person per day with a shelf life of 25 years.
I’ve also got a few six-gallon water containers, a bunch of water purification tablets, and basic camping equipment (stove, fuel) so my family is good for a couple months.
If we’re without food longer than that here in the NYC area then the bands of roving cannibals are going to be a bigger problem than the lack of food. Of course if everyone bought such a kit it wouldn’t be an issue.
Up to 25 years, excluding some of the contents, which is rated for up to 10 years.
I would get new ones every 10 years, eating the old ones.
You don’t need to spend this kind of money. You can easily build a cheap stockpile of basic staples like rice, beans, pasta and canned goods that you will normally eat, and then replace them as you eat them before they expire as part of your normal eating habits. For a few hundred dollars a person, plus a cabinet or two worth of space and a few plastic tubs to keep bugs out you can have the same effect. The only reason to have a freeze dried food stash is if it is in a location that you are going to bug out to in the case of SHTF.
And learn how to cook them without electricity or a gas stove
Did Zuess steal back fire or something?
Pasta probably isn’t practical more because of the water requirements (and that it actually requires a decently high temperature), but a lot of other canned goods and other long-lasting foods can be eaten without cooking and still taste better than freeze dried food and the “cooking” (if you choose to do so) is just warming up over a small fire/heat source for a few minutes.
Sure, I’m just asserting that most modern Americans don’t currently know how to do that. I certainly don’t
I would expect anyone even remotely interested in survival prep to have at least a vague sense of how to start a fire…
https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/propane-stoves
Having just the food isn’t all you need to do to be prepared.
Not in most cases. Quick check and we have ~18,000 calories worth of PB&J in the pantry, something like another 40,000 in dried fruit and nuts, 4,000 in sardines, 4,000 in pretzels. Just in stuff that will get eaten without any prep we are looking at 70-80,000 calories, and much of the other stuff can be eaten without cooking (large decrease in tastiness and some decrease in nutrition) so we don’t have to get into ‘have to figure out how to cook without a stove’ unless there is a long term power outage lasting a month plus without any chance for us to replenish our stores at all.
What about the rice and pasta you mentioned? I think only* Boy Scouts know how to set up a cooking fire these days. @CatCube’s propane convinced me, though
*obviously not literal
You eat the rice and pasta on days when the power is on.
IMO any situation which required most people in an area to live off stored food for a year would also carry a very high risk of that food being stolen by those who didn’t have any. This theft could be legal (rationing and expropriation) or illegal, but it’s very much present. So there’s somewhat of a tragedy of the commons effect – no individual benefit to me in storing food, unless most of my neighbours do the same, or I’m somehow unusually able to defend it – because my neighbours are probably going to be the ones eating it.
In other cultures and times, local governments have kept food reserves, which they distributed during the inevitable periodic famines. But those were generally places and times where local food sources were the only practical ones, and crop failures occurred regularly.
This risk appears to be of a less than once in a lifetime event, so not the kind of thing either an elected politician or manager of a publically traded firm can afford to care about – both have short term horizons enforced by their own self interest.
[Edit: storing food and water for shorter (and more frequently occurring) emergencies is on the other hand good normal planning. Where I grew up, there were ocassional winter storms closing roads for a day or two, and anyone with sense had the reserves to deal with even exceptionally lengthy snow closures.]
Preppers want a years worth of food because they
imagineplan on moving to the woods/mountains etc and building their life back up. The year’s worth of food is to cover them while they start over.That is kind of irrelevant, your reply misses the core issues of emergencies- they are unpredictable in many ways and the best path within them is to not be forced into decisions. If there is a riot in your city you will be happy(ier) if you don’t have to leave to get groceries when times are rough. Even if there is enough food in the stores, and you have enough money to buy the food, having more control over your food supply is of high value and might allow you to avoid taking risks at a time when you don’t want to take them.
If there’s a 365-day-long riot in my city, they’ve probably burned the whole city down well before the 180th day, including my home and all my stored food 🙁
Seriously, I’m talking about the scale of stored food, not the general principle. A year is either too much or too little – and for cases where it’s too little, you also need a highly defensible compound somewhere hard to access, and a large cooperating team to defend it. (I’d expect a single nuclear family to be way too small, without a lot of luck.)
A year is just right for living through a crop failure, and “crop failure” can just as well mean that all the local farmers started the year thinking they were supposed to grow the crops with the highest cash value when shipped to China rather than the highest nutritional value for their hungry neighbors, or all the local suburbanites thinking it was OK for their yards to be grass and decorative shrubbery rather than vegetable garden and potato patch.
But that requires either everyone have a years’ food, or the ones that do also have a plan to hold on to it through several months of increasingly intense attention from increasingly desperate neighbors. If you’re a Mormon in a mostly-Mormon community, the former will probably work. If not, “I’ve also got an AR-15 and lots of ammo” will almost certainly not work.
I could plant a vegetable garden, but the only part I’ll get to eat is the rabbit, assuming I trap it. Or maybe the deer, though the township will object if they catch me. The squirrels or groundhogs will likely get the potatoes, and squirrels at least are too hard to catch. Actually getting a crop from edible plants is difficult, there’s a reason it keeps getting pushed off to specialists.
Having “too much” compared to others around you isn’t an issue. The usual solution to that “problem” is that you either trade or give it to some of the other people around you (depending on the exact situation), which buys you goodwill, stuff you didn’t think to store, additional members to your group making you stronger than the looters, etc…
Unless you can keep anyone from being aware you have more food than everyone else and you’re willing to watch other people starve, just keeping it for yourself is likely not the optimal course of action.
Most people with a year’s supply of food fully expect that in an actual major emergency, we’re likely to be sharing that out with many of the nearby folks who need more food than is now remaining at the grocery store but didn’t think ahead that far. Better to be the sharer than the beggar, though.
@sharper13:
No, for that you need to be storing five years of food. If the harvest just failed and it’s going to be a year before the next harvest, and you have a year’s worth of food and your ten neighbors each have a month’s worth of food, then trading away some of your food for some of their stuff just means that you wind up starving to death with more and shinier stuff. And the goodwill of your starving neighbors won’t last because they’ll think you’re holding out on them.
More generally, you can only (well, should only) trade away food in excess of what is needed to survive to the next harvest / supply dump / whatever, no matter how much stuff or goodwill is promised. And if the community average is less than the survival-to-harvest requirement, then no amount of trading can change the fact that the options are A: everybody starves or B: some people hold back their food and don’t let the starving people have it and make that stick.
@Nybbler:
Last time I checked, the vast majority of the humans who have lived over the past six thousand years were gainfully employed getting crops from edible plants, and most of them were illiterate peasants. Only recently has that been pushed off on specialists, and the reason for that is the specialists got good enough at it that each of them can feed a hundred of the rest of us.
If, push comes to shove, you want to say “I can’t even mange to feed one person” and give up and die, sure, whatever, I’d miss you except that I think we’re past having a functional internet at that point anyway. But if the plan is for you to trade other goods or services for food, and your community’s average food reserve is not enough to last until the next harvest, then you’re betting that what you’ve got to trade is so valuable that a working farmer will say “Yeah, I’m going to let some other guy actually starve to death to get me some of what Nybbler’s offering”. Which maybe you do, but that is the standard.
.
Yes, and they worked from sunrise to sunset or more, nearly every day, just to scrape out that existence, fighting pests and vermin and disease and fully subject to the vagaries of the weather. And if a crop failure occurred, they died in job lots. Such farming is difficult, uncertain, and terrible and life in the past was hell for the illiterate peasants, and probably would have been even without the barons coming around to collect some portion of their crop in exchange for not killing them and (with any luck) not letting any other barons come around and take their crop.
You can’t do much else AND grow food under those conditions.
Life for subsistence farmers today still pretty much sucks.
If suburbanites have to take up subsistence farming, most of us (including me) are just going to die one way or another. Those who try to grow food will quickly find they don’t have nearly enough land to feed themselves, nor any real knowledge of how to farm it. Anything they do grow will likely get eaten by pests (which are quite abundant at least in my area). And that’s before you get to the two-legged variety.
Depends on the plants. We get more apples and peaches, in season, than we can eat. Tomatoes as well. And oranges and lemons and plums and pomegranates.
On the other hand, essentially zero apricots, because the squirrels get them when they are still green. If it was legal to use an air rifle to shoot squirrels, on the other hand, we could get squirrel, squirrel pelts, and apricots.
Don’t hurt Sasha’s daughter Natalie, David. Or I’ll let the possum lover who lives in your neck of the woods know where a wildlife hater lives.
>:P
In a more serious vein, this guy ( https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/touching-the-wild-touching-the-wild/8679/ ) actually bought all of the mule deer hunting permits in his area when studying and bonding with them, yet this still didn’t stop poachers from killing or driving off entire herds.
There’s a reason that “ammo” is part of the “stockpile canned goods and ammo” cliche.
As I understand it, this is mandatory in the LDS church.
It doesn’t cost 5500 for a year’s supply of food for one person. That’s what it costs if you want to keep basically your same eating habits during the apocalypse. If you want food that can sustain life in an absolute emergency it can cost as low as 200 dollars for a year’s supply(a pound of wheat berries is ~1500 calories). And most staples like wheat berries/rice/beans will last for more than 30 years in their cans. That changes your math to be ~28 dollars a year for a family of 4. For this paltry sum it is very foolish not to do this even given exceedingly low risk.
If storage is a concern, it is possible to store this year’s supply for 4 people under your bed.
Eternaltraveler:
I’ve never cooked with wheat berries before. Do you have any good recipes or preparation tips?
Not really. You can grind them into flour or cook them like rice.
The latter is a great deal less work than the former. One of my puzzles is why anyone invented bread, given how much more work it is.
Portable, ready-to-eat food for hunting or gathering expeditions.
Also don’t overlook how many nutrients may be captured inside undigestible, unmasticated kernels.
— Professor Quirrell, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Half the country won’t even save $400 to deal with an unexpected expense, and you think they are going to drop $1,500 a year on emergency food storage? College students don’t know who won the Civil War; you really expect them to have ever heard of the year without summer?
To a normie, the whole point of money is to spend it raising status. The particulars may vary (an inner city gentleman might buy gold jewelry for his teeth, while a working class individual goes into debt financing a shiny new car, a middle class individual travels to exotic locations that will provide great pictures for his Instagram account, and a rich man purchases a superyacht) but the basic idea is the same; money buys status which is then leveraged for reproductive opportunities. Prepping is low status (take a look at Doomsday Preppers to see what the mainstream thinks of survivalists). As far as unreasonable expectations go, asking people to spend money to lower their status is right up there with King Canute commanding the tides to stop rising (yes, yes, I know).
This statistic is somewhat misleading. In a world where almost everyone has access to unsecured credit, there isn’t a pressing need to have an emergency fund for expenses at that level. Your general point, however, is well taken.
Returning to this thread after it has kinda run it’s course:
I think something that was touched on in a number of comments but not covered in depth was the topic of a balanced plan for various long tail risks. In other words, as your plans go from 1 day to 1 week to 1 month, etc. which things do you plan for and what do you prioritize.
Part of what may be keeping people from spending a small amount of time and effort on food or water supplies is the sense that there are a large number of other items that need to be considered in parallel. For more minor disruptions, this could be things like: do you have neighbors who would help you in an emergency, do you know the best way to approach different disasters in your area, is your vehicle in good repair. In the longer term, this could include: could you live with your extended family, do you have the flexibility to take up farming or subsistence hunting, is it worth it to even prepare for this.
It might be a good topic for a later open thread to talk about what are some low cost (money, attention, and weirdness points*) ways to improve on these types of concerns. I’d also be curious if there are some SCC or rationalist specific ideas which would apply.
*I’ve probably exceeded my personal quota by posting this.
Rewatching Max Max: Fury Road (which I liked much better than the first time I watched it 2 years and a half ago, I guess it grew on me), I was reminded of an analysis of the film and became aware of a fallacy that comes up when discussing the morality of a given model of society/civilization.
I could call it “the fallacy of discredit by denunciation of narrative”.
Basically it consists of detailing the narrative of a society (“Immortan Joe is a generous warrior God leading his children to Valhalla”), then pointing out that the narrative is just a narrative and that underneath the society works in a rather different way from what is claimed (“Immortan Joe is actually a human warlord ruling with an iron fist over a population of starving slaves and brainwashed, sick murderers and robbers”), and from this conclude that this society is morally wrong not just judged from our point of view, but as proven by the fact that it needs a narrative to hide its true nature.
It is a fallacy because of course, all societies work like this. All societies have a master narrative which is not so much a justification but rather an emotionally palatable rationalization of how this society actually works beneath the hood. Even liberal democracy has quite the gap between the narrative that most westerners buy into (“popular sovereignty”, “popular representation”, “social contract”, “human rights”) and the reasons that actually make liberal democracies so functional and enduring (very strong rule of law, highly procedural, transparent and strictly enforced succession rules, multiple sets of highly efficient tool to blow out political violence, a finely tuned equilibrium between the attractors of totalitarianism/absolute power/divine right on one side and factionalism/civil war/feodalism on the other, etc).
This is of course because why a given mode of societal organization is successful is actually quite a difficult thing to analyze and certainly not at the grasp of most people who live in such a society. The narrative mostly exists because it is a simpler rationalization, easier to come up with and comprehend, but it’s the same kind of narrative that most people use for their personal actions — it doesn’t make these actions automatically morally wrong, it just means that most people don’t have access to their own motives.
Is there a name for such a fallacy?
“Fallacy of discredit by denunciation of narrative” is a special case of the fallacy fallacy. If you have an argument N which concludes X, and you show that N is invalid, it does not prove X is false.
Oddly, it doesn’t feel like a fallacy to me. Societies aren’t binary – true or false, bad or good.
If a society has narratives that are especially obviously wrong, or especially blatantly extol values no successful person in that society actually follows, it’s worse than one with less unreasonable narratives that’s otherwise the same.
But of course there never is a comparison society available that’s precisely the same except for the narratives. And this is part of the complexity you discuss in your final paragraph.
But I still avoid buying into narratives that are obviously false, or joining/supporting the groups producing those narratives. At a personal level, this is generally not on a national or cultural level, but more a matter of group (sub)cultures, but it seems to me that the same rules apply.
Wikipedia refers to “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” as an “epic comedy”. Are there any other examples of movies that are epic comedies? Off the top of my head I can’t think of any. Granted, “epic” might be a vague term, but “It’s a Mad…” is the only comedy I can think of that’s over three hours. Am I missing any?
3 Idiots (2009) is only 170 minutes, but it is epic, ie, too long. There are many Bollywood comedies that do break 3 hours.
IMDB has opinions.
It claims that the Saragossa Manuscript (1965, 182″) is comedy. I find that an odd label, but I include it because I’ve actually seen it. Less oddly labeled is La Dolce Vita (1960, 174″).
I have not seen Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974, 193″), but I think it was influential.
Sometimes people use “epic comedy” to describe the micro-genre of comic long-distance races largely started by Mad (1963), such as the 1965 films the Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. But a long-distance race doesn’t need a long running time. Flying is only 138 minutes, although the Great Race at 160 is getting up there. The earlier Around the World in 80 Days (1956) is 178 minutes. The 2004 version of 80 is only 120 minutes. Silver Streak (1976) is 114. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) is only 96 minutes, a normal length comedy. (Manuscript would be better described as picaresque, but that’s pretty close to road trip…)
I don’t think “epic” has ever been taken primarily as a measure of length, at least outside the realm of poetry. And even in poetry, the implication is that [subject] is worthy of a novel’s worth of verbiage, not that the writer couldn’t stop himself from adding verses. It’s “epic” if it tells the story of great and heroic deeds, preferably of a singular epic hero.
As Douglas Knight notes, there’s a sub-genre of “race(*) comedies”, where you can easily imagine the same tale being spun as a heroic quest for fortune and glory. Those should all qualify as epic comedies.
For the lone-hero version, both “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” would fit, independent of running time. Coherent stories of heroes striving for a singular triumph, not just a framework for a string of gags.
* No, the other kind of race
Oh yeah, like those Shanghai movies with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson! Or those Rush Hour movies with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Oh, and Blazing Saddles… those are great.
… oh.
I was very sad to learn that this wasn’t going to be a discussion of Jackie Chan buddy cop movies since I read this thread in reverse.
Life of Brian. Given it borrows a lot from the unquestionably epic Ben Hur, has a fairly epic opening title, and breaks off midway through for an epic spacecraft chase scene, I think it qualifies.
Wouldn’t the MCU films count? Or do we need to get even more overtly comedic? If the climax should have to happen based on comedic principles, then a lot of heist films would become eligible, as any that have a HEA are all about a twist that puts a pie in the antagonist’s face.
Clinton is now at 7.2% chance to win the nomination on BetFair. I’ve been out of the loop, can someone explain why this is happening?
Yesterday (or maybe the day before) Trump tweeting something to the effect of “Warren is so crazy, Clinton should come back and steal the nomination from her.” Clinton replied back something to the effect of “don’t tempt me.” She’s also made a couple jokes about it sense then.
None of what has transpired leads me to believe she’d either be crazy enough to enter the race or that she’d stand a snowballs chance in heck of winning the nomination. 7.2% is IMO high.
Yeah, that’s at most a small part of the story. She’s been rising for weeks.
I don’t agree with those odds, but if I was trying to steelman the thinking that went into someone buying up to that %, it would be a combination of:
(1) There’s a small-but-non-zero chance that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office, which will strengthen Hillary Clinton’s presumptive claim to the presidency on the grounds that the 2016 election was ‘stolen.’
(2) Biden has been faltering significantly in the past few weeks [potentially losing his polling lead to Warren and not having a good response to concerns that his son is a maybe-not-technically-illegally-corrupt sleazeball], which increases the odds of a center-left “white knight” candidate being anointed by the party before the primaries start.
(3) The structure of the Democratic primaries have no winner-take-all-states, meaning that if the vote splinters we might have a contested convention, and Clinton being a compromise candidate that emerges out of the chaos could be a thing.
Trump being removed is priced at around 20%. Your (1) and (3) sound like they could fully explain it.
I think with Biden faltering, people are thinking that maybe that lane needs another player. Warren is becoming the frontrunner, particularly on the coasts, but that I think makes a lot of people nervous.
Maybe, but these odds still seem ridiculous. I think the entire Democratic field could keel over dead tomorrow and Hillary still wouldn’t be the nominee. (Cue jokes about “mass suicide by double gunshot to the back of the head”).
This is not the existing state of play in democratic circles. Even people who liked Hillary are glad she’s gone, entirely based on the amount of baggage she’d been loaded up with. Combine that with a race that managed to lose to Trump and even in places where she was popular, she’s not that well loved.
Also, if Trump is impeached, it won’t be about 2016.
Yeah, but like, 3 different people in the campaign already (Buttigeg, Booker and Harris) are all already positioned in that space and are all significantly more popular among the left than Hillary.
This seems highly unlikely.
Betting markets – especially small markets – can easily be shifted by outsized moves by a small handful of whales.
That’s always a good hypothesis, which is why I recommend checking not just betfair, but also predictit. However, it turns out that it has roughly the same odds, so that’s not the answer. (Also, sty said that this isn’t an abrupt spike.)
I don’t think this disproves my hypothesis? It just suggests that the whales have been operating across multiple platforms, over an extended period of time. I’ll admit that this makes my hypothesis less likely, but the only way to disprove it would be to figure out how many unique IDs there are taking the pro-HRC bet, and how big their bets are.
What does “whale” mean? At some level of lots of whales distributed across multiple platforms, it just means a bettors that you disagree with.
Are you saying anything beyond what Protagoras (later) said that there isn’t that much resolution? But there is more liquidity, and lower fees, and less long-shot bias on betfair than on predictit. And even predictit has more than 7% resolution.
Donald Trump has been publicly taunting her. This has instantly raised interest in her again from all the people who dislike Donald Trump.
Honestly, at this point it’s really looking like Trump has unlocked some kind of social super-powers, with the primary limitation on them being that the API is Twitter. He wins because he has somehow hacked the brains of the US elites and sends out directives to them 120 characters at a time, disguised as bizarre rambling and raving.
This is probably why Kamala Harris is trying to get him banned from Twitter. She’s trying to disarm him by removing his access to the orbital mind control lasers.
Harris’s letter is pretty funny:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90412223/why-wont-twitter-ban-trump-kamala-harris-wants-to-know
Oh no, someone’s not following a website’s user agreement, what a national emergency! Still, the fact that he goads people into embarrassing themself doesn’t mean it’s all N-dimensional chess. It’s bizarre rambling and raving.
It can be BOTH bizarre rambling AND mind control!
I mean, obviously I’m joking about the orbital mind control lasers, but I’ve seriously concluded at this point that Trump is, in fact, supremely excellent at what he does.
It’s just that science can’t, at this time, understand why what he is doing works. It doesn’t look like it should work. Nobody expected it to work originally, and then we were all sure it was a fluke and it would stop working, but it just keeps going.
You know all those AI-in-a-box thought experiments, where the question is if the super-smart AI could talk a person into unshackling it? If that AI were Donald Trump, given only a text channel to communicate 120 characters at a time, it would already be out of the box. It would have made its enemies so angry that they let it out of the box just so they could kick its ass in person.
And now we’re all standing around scratching our heads and asking what just happened there, except for some people who are really, really upset and are gearing up to go kick that AI’s ass for real this time, as soon as they figure out how to open up the next box…
It’s weird. It’s a weird, weird thing.
+1
Covfefe
(just in case)
Not sure if he meant “coffee” or that’s his cute little dog’s name.
I believe the current theory is that it was a horrendous typo of “coverage”.
Figure out how much money you can make by betting against Clinton, assuming her odds are seriously overvalued. Is it significant? Is the return even positive after BetFair’s cut? If the answers are negative, the phenomenon is not particularly mysterious. Irrational bets are to be expected, and while if there’s a profitable way to exploit the irrationality, they should be swamped by people doing such exploitation, if there’s no profitable way to exploit the irrationality, the irrationality will stubbornly persist in the results.
I can’t make any money on prediction markets because of where I live, but buying no shares for Clinton should be pretty significant.
She’s also not the kind of person that’s expected to be overvalued. You can make that argument for Yang (I wouldn’t) but Clinton should, if anything, be less popular with odds makers. It seems to me like the more plausible option is that her odds are legit.
Are they actually setting those odds, or is it just driven by the market (legitimate question)?
Pretty sure they’re driven by the market, though I don’t understand exactly how the process works.
Predictit and Betfair are transparent markets, none of their own money on the line, facilitating bets between their users. They show you the order book, ie, the number of dollars available to bet at the current price, and the next price. Googling “president bookie” I find things like this which seem to be bookies setting their own prices. I’m not sure how to read them, but they look pretty similar, eg, Clinton at 6x Booker. Here is a comparison of a bunch of sites.
What is going on with Luna, the infamous blockchain dating app backed by acid-taking cam girls and enlightened™ Hindu tech bro MMA fighters?
They switched to Ethereum at the end of last year and then pretty much all communication seems to have ceased in 2019, with a single 2019 tweet in February. No new code has been committed to their GitHub since April.
In the Play store, I see zero reviews of the app, although this may be because I’m not looking at the Korean Play store.
Are they dying/dead?
I’m out the loop on this one, but it sounds fascinating. Do you have a summary / relevant link I can check out?
See these posts:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/18/practically-a-book-review-luna-whitepaper/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/
tl;dr is the product sounds inherently scammy, which commenters pointed out, and the guy who created it responded semi-politely at first in the comments but gradually descended into derangement as no one accepted his hand-waves.
That thread is pure gold. Ajape – you broke his mind there. My existing quantity respect for you (not inconsiderable) has incremented upwards.
When did the acid-taking cam girls come into it? I haven’t consumed the whole thing, but I’m pretty much just exclusively seeing Hindu tech bro MMA Fighters so far?
The ex cam girl is Aella, who was traumatized because of sexual abuse by garden gnomes (NSFW!!!), which she cured by taking LSD, which almost killed her. She also did nude mime (NSFW!!!).
She does very interesting surveys on her Twitter and has a blog with fairly interesting content, like an in depth examination of how a cam girl earns money. Opinions are divided on whether she exploited or helped lonely men (or both), which may be a good description of Luna, as well.
Put A Number On It (the green rationalist (who is not Pepe*)) recently published a two-part interview with her.
She also wrote a little FAQ on Luna which is actually a lot more informative and less crazy than Vinay Gupta’s ‘sales pitch.’
* The famous Hong Kong freedom fighter.
@Aapje:
I was fairly confused before your link. After, I don’t think I’ve ever been more confused in my life.
I’m pretty sure it’s sexual exploitation of lonely (= can’t find girlfriend) men. Whether it helps them psychologically… is actually a really interesting question. There’s evidence that the talk therapy psychologists do works equally well regardless of the scientific theory behind it, so why not the non-scientific theory of “I’m hot and naked and will talk about your feelings for pay”?
This is not meant to be in any way a knock on Scott’s practice, since he’s an MD who can combine the powerful science behind psychopharmacology with the Talking Cure.
Maybe Scott should try talking to his patients and prescribing them drugs while naked. Given that he’s in San Francisco, I expect this would make his practice super successful. /s
If the camgirl and the lonely guy both ended up better off after their interaction than before, then it’s hard to call that exploitation. It truly suck for both of them that they don’t have better options for meeting their needs for food/sex than being a camgirl/interacting with camgirls, but taking away the option of being/interacting with camgirls wouldn’t fix that, it would just make both parties worse off.
@Le Maistre Chat
Thanks for the compliment.
I embellished a bit for fun. She was a cam girl who was very creative. The gnome picture set seemed to be part of her advertising on Reddit. Bonus content (NSFW).
She has said that LSD made her deal with trauma better, although she never specified what trauma. So for comedic effect, I put 1 and 1 together.
@viVI_IViv
You aren’t supposed to call yourself a doctor if you do that, because then it’s abuse of power within the patient-doctor relationship.
The proper way to do it is to call yourself a guru. A guru can have sex with his disciples as much as he wants.
PS. At first, I read ‘parents,’ as in “Maybe Scott should try talking to his parents and prescribing them drugs while naked.” I was
arousedconfused.@albatross:
This. I was thinking more in terms of “it’s sad that this desperation exists to financially exploit”, not “this should be banned.” Because that could make both parties worse off.
To clarify, the guy who went crazy in the comments is *not* the founder of Luna at all. He was a more famous name who gave the project credibility in the early stages but had extremely little to do with the actual thing.
They’re dying, but only because Vinay Gupta broke all of the users’ arms.
In addition to being an enlightened being, he’s also from a warrior culture. They have extracted respect from their enemies at the point of a sword for a thousand years, and are feared the world over by those who have had the misfortune to cross them.
And that’s a very practical fact: his lineage is parallel to the Gurkhas. You could think of him as a Gurkha priest.
(Note for the confused: the creator of Luna, Vinay Gupta, had a very englightened meltdown in the SSC comments section last year, including this delightful copypasta.)
Except that by his own admission, he’s more Scottish than Nepalese. Naturally, he picked Deiseach as his primary opponent in a steel-cage deathmatch of wit and will. This did not go well for him.
Didn’t leave me expecting that his dating-app project would amount to anything either, but I was expecting more in the way of entertainingly spectacular self-destruction.
A Gurkha priest would have more self-control.
(My favorite Gurkha story is the one who was on a train when bandits broke in and started to rob it. He didn’t put up a fight against that, only when they tried to rape a girl near him. Then he drove them off single-handed.)
Also, he wouldn’t wave around a Blue Ribbon from the 2002 DoD Science Fair like it was supposed to make us take him seriously.
Scottish Gurkha priest. Kukri in one hand, Claymore in the other, meditative enlightenment concurrent with drunken rage. Fights furiously with the train-robbers before realizing they were even trying to rob anyone, then offers them a sheep in place of the girl. Also, there’s bagpipes in there somewhere.
Oh, crap. My mind just went to the scary place where somehow Groundskeeper Willie and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon can be the same person.
… if by ‘somewhere’ you mean ‘at the top of Mount Everest’? Those Gurkha bagpipers don’t lack for ambition 🙂
Costs one red, one green, and one black to summon. 3/1. Cannot be blocked. Cannot have deathtouch.
They all dived into the deepest of the Blockchain until they
ran out of drugsreached the Nirvana, now they subsist only by making cam shows starring handsomeScottishGurkha warriors breaking the arms of Irishhagsladies.Aella here, who worked at Luna. I quit August 2018, and have been out of the loop since then, but afaik Luna’s in hibernation, particularly after the drop in crypto and a confusing/hefty tax burden reduced a lot of its flexibility to do things.
Everyone’s already upped sticks for newer, greener Open Threads (I’m just passing through, by chance), but just in case you drop in here again: thanks for posting the update and the explanation of Gupta’s role in the whole enterprise.
Are we in a Constitutional Crisis?
Let’s take Trump and the whole current situation out of it for a minute. If a neutral congress sent subpoenas relate to impeachment to a neutral presidency and the president refused to comply, do you think that would be obstruction? If so, would that obstruction be impeachable?
Bringing Trump back into the picture: is there anything about the current situation that changes either of your two answers above?
Projecting forward: how do you think this whole thing ends?
My understanding of the argument currently on the table is that there hasn’t been an actual impeachment yet, and so there are no subpoenas related to an impeachment to comply with, just a fishing expedition with no legal basis.
The worse the 2020 election looks for the democrats, the higher the likelihood of an impeachment.
Not quite, if “actual impeachment” refers to formal articles of impeachment actually passed by the House. That is the possible final result, not the process. The process argument currently on the table is that there has been no House vote to open a formal impeachment inquiry. That would be a separate vote from the actual up-or-down vote on articles of impeachment. Theoretically one could vote in favor of the investigation, then decide it didn’t turn up impeachable offenses and vote against impeachment. The question is whether there needs to be that “impeachment inquiry” vote in order for the House to gain its allegedly greater powers of investigation. On the one hand, I believe prior impeachments have begun with such a preliminary vote to open a formal inquiry prior to the final vote, and it makes some sense – if the House doesn’t formally vote that it’s doing this, then what’s to stop every committee from claiming any subpoena “could lead to impeachable offenses” and then you’ve obliterated the category. On the other hand, the counter is that the Speaker declared it, and perhaps the Speaker has the power to do that. It’s never been litigated that I’m aware of. In practice, of course, it’s pretty clear that Pelosi just doesn’t want to put any of her members on the hook to actually vote for something that swing-district ads can unambiguously cite as “Member ____ voted with Pelosi to impeach Donald Trump.”
ETA: I referred to “allegedly” greater subpoena powers – I tend to agree with brad below that it is, at least, legally unclear whether using the magic word “impeachment” unlocks greater subpoena powers or defeats executive privilege or not.
noted. thanks for the explanation.
I don’t think “related to impeachment” is particularly relevant to the question of whether or not we are in a constitutional crisis. It’s not clear that an “impeachment inquiry” or impeachment proper unlocks special powers as opposed to just providing an opportunity to use preexisting powers.
Anyway, given the ongoing back and forth over congressional subpoenas addressed to executive branch officials we’ve had in the last few decades I wouldn’t say this episode counts as a crisis until there’s a dramatic escalation over those prior tussles. The two that would qualify I can think of are: Congress attempting to utilize its inherent contempt power and on the other side the executive branch continuing to defy subpoenas if the judicial branch came down on Congress’ side.
Very likely, but it would have to be Congress that issues those subpoenas. If it’s just Nancy Pelosi and the House Judiciary Committee or whatever, then no.
If Nancy calls a floor vote and a majority of Congressmen vote to issue subpoenas, or to empower committees X, Y, and Z to issue subpoenas, then Trump’s refusal will rise to the level of a constitutional crisis. If she conspicuously does not put it to the whole of Congress, even though the alleged purpose is to prepare for an impeachment that would have to go to the whole of Congress anyway, then Trump can probably stonewall forever and get away with it. Even if technically legal, the latter sort of subpoena would look incredibly weak, and this is a political rather than legal process.
Uhhhh, isn’t this what they did at the beginning of the term?
As I understand it, the first day of the term includes a formal vote to adopt the rules that will govern that congress. The current rules grant subpoena power to the committee chairs. The previous congress changed these rules and the new congress kept them. This is all “IIRC”.
+1
The house doesn’t need to be in impeachment proceedings to issue subpoenas.
The only difference I can see is that ignoring a subpoena while in impeachment proceedings is obviously obstructing justice, while ignoring the other ones is just likely obstructing justice, but that’s a pretty unsteady hat rack to hang your cap on.
@Aftagley: Executive Privilege has actually been holding pretty steady these past few decades. Meanwhile, generic “obstructing justice” is weaksauce at best and completely useless against POTUS unless you’re willing and able to impeach him over it. So these subpoenas are going to be correctly seen as utterly ineffectual and unenforceable unless backed by the willingness of 51% of the House to vote otherwise.
Not getting that 51% up front, even for “OK, this is just to issue impeachment-grade subpoenas”, makes it look even more like a fishing expedition to do an end run around executive privilege under cover of a phony impeachment.
There hasn’t been a claim of executive privilege.
That has been pretty clearly established because the DNI went to the White House to ask if they were making a claim of executive privilege and they did not make that claim.
In addition, executive privilege isn’t a blanket immunity to oversight. It applies in specific circumstances, not whenever the POTUS asserts it.
It would be nice of you to acknowledge that your statement about the House not voting to give subpoena powers was incorrect. I don’t know what “impeachment grade subpoenas” are, but I think you mean something different than you originally stated.
We’ve been in a Constitutional crisis for a while. It ends whenever the President assumes full power and Congress becomes a ceremonial body.
Did this in Trump seem ambitious?
I meant a generic US president, not Trump. We’re probably at least another 10 years from Congress losing its power.
So, I originally read you post as being a claim that we’re 10 years away from no longer being a democracy.
Rereading it, it seems like your saying we’ll still vote for President, just he or she won’t have to share power with anyone. Do you mind clarifying?
Pretty much what you said. The US constitution is unambiguous on the President serving more than two terms. It can’t happen. It’s also clear on electoral procedure. We have to have an election every four years, and everybody is going to be vigilant about anyone trying to rig it for themselves. But the lines between Presidential powers and Congressional powers have been purposely blurred for whoever happens to be President. For example, only Congress is allowed to declare war, so the president will initiate “police action”. Since our government is dysfunctional and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change, the President is going to take more and more powers for themselves. It seems only a matter of time before they take nearly all of it. The Supreme Court may or may not be subsumed in this process, but it’s losing its perceived legitimacy every day.
I think we’re far from a Constitutional crisis. The USC is clear: the House can set whatever rules it wants to determine impeachment, as discussed downthread.
What we’re in is a Democratic Party crisis. I think Pelosi sees her job as getting a Democrat elected President, while looking like she’s doing her duty under the USC. The latter means holding a vote (the only recognized way to have the House exercise its power to impeach), but the former means holding it only if it will weaken Trump in a way that gets a Democrat elected.
Fortunately, Pelosi has the following superpowers: one, she can rely on most of the press to spin anything her way short of a formal vote; two, she’s Speaker, so she can set whatever rules she likes before that vote; three, she’s personally very good at knowing where the votes are, and how many weeks the House will take to get any given thing done. Given this, we can infer that she probably doesn’t have the votes yet; if she did, it would have happened by now.
However, an impeachment this early would fail her first objective, as it would lead to a Senate vote to remove with probably negative consequences: it either looks like a no vote, slapping the Democratic House down for its insolence, or a yes vote, but giving Pence over a year to build support. Pelosi is smart enough to know this.
So it’s tricky. The time to remove Trump is right before the election, but convincingly. But that’s where setting the rules comes in. Pelosi can write the rules to make the process take just long enough that that House vote happens just in time for the Senate to take its vote. It has to look legit, but that’s what the press is for. What exactly to do is up to her; “vote for an inquiry” has some nice features. The inquiry can take as long as she wants. The vote to have it lends it weight. The catch: if she doesn’t have the votes to impeach, she might also not have the votes for an inquiry. It’s easier, but not necessarily assured. Which is why that vote hasn’t happened yet, either.
When Pelosi says “we’re going to hold a vote on opening an inquiry”, the subtext I read is “as soon as I talk enough Representatives into voting ‘yes'”.
I am kind of curious. If Trump got impeached and the Senate confirms, removing him from office in Sept 2020, does that mean he can’t run for office again? My intuition is that conviction would have no effect on his next election, so he’d just take office again in 2021 if he won the election. In which case it seems to me that impeaching Trump near the point of the election would be a bad strategy, since it would energize his supporters and might bring more pro-Trump voters to the polls? Am I wrong?
Not that there is any chance whatsoever of conviction by the Senate without some incredible bombshell evidence.
As a result, the two punishments available to the Senate while acting as a court for impeachment are:
1. Removal from office
2. Disqualification from future office
Normal Senate procedure is to have a separate vote on each available remedy. Only three times in history has the Senate applied the second one.
The constitution says: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
Is it constitutionally clear the Presidency is an “Office of honor, Trust or Profit”? In your link, the three people who were disqualified from holding future office were all judges who were appointed to their position rather than elected. I’ve seen some online argument that this distinction is important, and that one cannot be disqualified from future elected positions, but I don’t know whether there is actually a legal basis for this. For example, has there ever been a vote to disqualify an elected official that failed to pass?
It has a salary, so yes.
To clairify:
is there a world where the Senate leaves Trump in office but bans him from running for any future office?
@baconbits9,
The rules of the Senate are that the first vote combines conviction and removal (the first is treated as automatically removing)and that they only vote on disqualification if the Senate desires to after the person is convicted.
So they’d have to seriously rewrite the rules to somehow convict and disqualify, but not remove from office.
@nkurz,
Here’s a discussion of your point. The Senate hasn’t ever convicted an elected official and attempted to disqualify them from future office (Two acquitted Presidents, one Senator they expelled prior to being impeached), so ultimately it’d be up to them and the USSC, but the historical record from State constitutions with similar provisions and impeached governors seems to indicate they could.
It depends on the Senate. The Constitution specifies:
The Senate has historically (when impeaching lower officials) interpreted this as meaning that it can optionally, after removing an official from office, impose the additional punishment of disqualifying him from holding future office. If they chose to do that after convicting Trump, then he could not run in 2020.
If convicted, the senate would be overwhelmingly likely to disbar him too. The democrats because “Fuck that guy, never dealing with him again” and the republicans to preclude him running as a third party candidate.
I endorse this reading, with perhaps the caveat of re-phrasing that last bit as “as soon as I think it will help get a democrat elected president, assuming I’ve talk enough Representatives into voting ‘yes’”.
I’d try to point how this framing is inherently biased and simply accepts right-wing conservative talking head talking points, and that framing it this way in your analysis clouds your thinking …
But what would be the point?
This kind of stuff being broadly accepted here is why I’ve basically stopped posting.
I’ll admit I don’t see how the quoted phrase is particularly biased. Pelosi’s goal as a Democratic speaker of the house is to see the Democratic party gain and hold power. McConnel’s goal as a Republican majority leader in the senate is to see the Republican party gain and hold power. Both will do what they can to further that goal within the constraints of the law. Both have many other goals they’d like to carry out, but as leaders of their parties they’re going to be heavily focused on getting their parties into power. Similarly, I assume most Republicans will vote against impeachment even if they think Trump’s behavior deserves impeachment, because they don’t want their party to lose power. That’s not 100%–if Trump is babbling about little green men and voices in his head or gets caught trying to assassinate a member of congress, they’ll go along with impeachment. But not for the stuff that’s currently come out.
The question was about a constitutional crisis, predicated by the current admin officially stating that they will not comply with any requests for testimony or documents.
And the statement is that this is a crisis …for the Democratic Party.
This moment, right now, is a crisis … for the Democratic Party.
That is some classic argumentative pivot.
And while we are on it …
This too, while having some elements of truth, is an acceptance of a frame that biases analysis. It’s the kind of framing that ignores that governance is consequential. There are actually principals involved here, not just a cynical “Power is the only thing that matters” might-makes-right worldview.
I think I’ve been struggling for months to articulate in my own mind why I find so much of the discussion here frustratingly off-base. Thank you for this.
I find this view most frustrating when applied to folks that aren’t political actors or at least don’t think of themselves that way.
The OP’s question was “Are we in a Constitutional Crisis?” I can’t see why “No, it’s something else” shouldn’t be an acceptable answer.
Because he basically ignored my question to try and spin yarn about the democratic party.
I mean, I don’t mind; there’s no rule you have to stay on topic around here, but the original post laid out the current state of play and then asked “does this rise to the level of being a constitutional crisis?”
The answer he gave kind of hand waved that question and started talking about his impression of what Nancy Pelosi was doing from a maximally right and maximally cynical perspective. This looks like he’s trying to refrain the question, so HBC called him out for it.
Seriously – my question was “Is the President ignoring legally-issued Subpoena’s a constitutional crisis?” to which his response was a nonsensical “I think we’re far from a Constitutional crisis. The USC is clear: the House can set whatever rules it wants to determine impeachment”
Governance can be consequential, and it can simultaneously be true that most politicians are primarily amoral creatures of power.
Although I don’t see how Brinkley’s claim that
holds water which makes the rest of it moot. She doesn’t currently have any duty to impeach or not impeach, so she’s free to follow other considerations.
There’s no duty she fails by taking time. It would be stupid not to take some time right now. She has months to burn if needed.
The Democrats have an opportunity, not a crisis.
Asked and answered, I’d say. A “constitutional crisis” is a conflict where it’s unclear what the Constitution requires, or where there’s reason to believe that it might not be followed. To be sure, Brinkley is still guilty of Posting While Conservative, but I’m told they haven’t enforced that law in years.
I read HBC’s initial complaint as that I was operating from the premise that Pelosi was just being some sneaky Democratic apparatchik, instead of being a faithful servant of the the nation as a whole. In that light, I agree that it colors my analysis; I’ve ruled out an entire class of scenarios.
I never meant to imply that this was some sort of existential crisis for the Democratic Party, and so I’ll cheerfully back off from that phrasing. I think the Dems are alive and well; I see this more as just a tough political conundrum for them. I don’t even see it as a make or break for Pelosi; at worst, she makes a non-optimal call, Trump becomes a two-term president, but she’s still Speaker, easily. This is just an opportunity for her and the Democrats to build more support, at the risk of losing some. (Maybe a lot, if they bungle it, but I doubt that’ll happen.)
I’m guessing from context you meant principles. Sure, I like principles. I love principles. And I think there exist no principles clearly at stake here. Check it out. Trump’s discussion with Ukraine isn’t clearly impeachable. Pelosi knows this. Trump’s discussion might relate to something that is. Pelosi knows this, too. The Democrats have been beating the impeachment drum for most of Trump’s term. Pelosi knows this as well. She’s no idiot. So, let’s expand that part of the game terrain a little:
Pelosi knows there might be something impeachable somewhere in there, and if so, the question of whether to move on it is moot; it ought to be, nearly everyone agrees, left, right, swing, insiders, voters. So the real question is “is there?”. She doesn’t know for sure (let’s suppose there’s no secret information here), but she does know that impeachment has an unmistakable political component. Which is to say, technically, she could impeach Trump for leaving his zipper open, but that wouldn’t fly in the court of public opinion.
So she’s back to square one, estimating probabilities, and even the act of publically estimating probabilities is political. Which is why I said she has to look like she’s doing her duty to the USC. Just doing it isn’t enough, and just doing it goes without saying; again, if Trump tried to, say, ignore the 22nd Amendment, she’d have no trouble knowing what to do. The vagueness here, along with her known bias as a party member, is what requires her to not only do the right thing, but also have the appearance of doing so.
When every action has such gray shades of risks and rewards, I think the power component does indeed become dominant. @HBC, Aftagley: if it makes you feel better, I agree with albatross11: this calculus isn’t limited to Democrats in general. I expect Republicans to be every bit as sneaky and conniving. It’s just that in this turn of the game, it’s the Democrats’ move. That’s all.
To people outside the DC beltway: welcome to life near the DC beltway. This is how the game works, even if you reason idealistically from first principles.
@Aftagley: it’s simply not a Constitutional crisis, and I strongly believe that anyone who says it is is getting too worked up, or is a talking head on TV trying to get more ad revenue. To the extent that it’s interesting, it’s a puzzle for Pelosi to work out. As you say, it’s an opportunity, albeit a risky one.
@HeelBearCub
I strongly hope you don’t stop posting. Despite my base level disagreements, I enjoy your contributions.
Pushback against built-in assumptions that I have is valuable in an “iron sharpens iron” way to me and I hope to others.
Kind words.
But, basically the wrong tense.
I’m not flouncing, I’m noting what’s already happened.
@HeelBearCub
I understand that. I am commenting hoping for a change that causes you to post more.
I’ll join the EchoChamber and echo EchoChaos.
For instance, I would be very interested to see you expand on the other possibilities the Democrats have, and what your starting premises are. I might push back (as time permits), but I mostly just want to view as much of the terrain as I can.
DeWitt:
How about: Left woman bad, orange man even worse.
@albatross11:
I don’t particularly like the phrasing DeWitt put on it, but …
not many posts here espousing your restatement of the position.
As to why? I’d guess that the phrase “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the Occam appropriate answer.
To use an annoying local idiom: Less of this.
Specifically, “less of” trying to impose your point of view by hinting it is required by discussion norms and implicitly nudging our host to sanction others.
That view is only right-wing as applied. It’s just cynicism. If we’re dropping that, we should also drop the idea that Trump’s desire to investigate Biden stems from anything but a sincere desire to root out public corruption.
If you believe that Trump’s actions in Ukraine are clearly and obviously motivated by a desire for personal political gain, then you should see this as a crisis for Republicans. If it’s that obvious, then my statement makes even more sense.
This whole “less of this” thing tends to get applied in one direction. Sorry it offends you that I’m pointing it out.
It’s not a “crisis” for anyone for politicians to be motivated by a desire for personal political gain. It’s business as usual. I think Trump has enough cover in the Ukraine thing in that the Bidens’ actions are rather suspicious on their face, thus giving Trump a plausible legitimate motive. That doesn’t mean I believe that’s his actual motive. The same goes for the Democrats wanting to impeach him over it.
Cut it out. If there’s a worthy criticism here (and I think there is), it deserves more effort.
It also deserves more worthy criticism than basically “You are all stupid people repeating right-wing talking points, and will never learn better”. If we’re going to have that level of “effort”, I kind of do prefer the simplicity and honesty of DeWitt’s phrasing.
Hrmph. To be fair, yes, this too.
I fail to see what exactly you are objecting to here on a factual level. Is your conjecture that Pelosi isn’t concerned about the prospects of a 2020 election? That some of her caucus is much more gung ho for impeachment than the rest?
Yes, if Congress gets some kind of favorable judgment and Trump still ignores it.
I predict that he will ignore any kind of judgment requiring him to give documents to Congress, at which point we will, in fact, be in a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Do you think the Supreme Court is going to side with Congress?
My impression is they are currently pretty deferential to the Executive.
I don’t know. If the SC says that the White House doesn’t have to cooperate with an impeachment inquiry, they’re basically defanging the entire idea of impeachment. I guess at that point we don’t have a constitutional crisis, but only because the SC has ruled that the executive branch has no checks on its power at all. I hope they aren’t that partisan.
They could rule that an actual “impeachment inquiry” needs to be formally voted on by the House, as it was for Clinton and Nixon in order to get those powers, which would thread the needle nicely.
Can’t congress still impeach anyways by just going to a vote?
Trump will still ignore subpoenas if this happens. He’ll find some justification for it.
Getting evidence for impeachment will be much harder if the Executive branch can just ignore subpoenas. It functionally makes impeachment impossible.
I’m not an expert on this area of law, but in a non-legal more general sense, this seems incorrect. If the legislature suspects impeachable offenses, and the executive tells them to pound sand, then the legislature can take that refusal to cooperate as its evidentiary basis for impeachment. In other words, there is no Constitutional requirement of a “presumption of innocence” that Congress needs to overcome. It “functionally makes impeachment impossible” only because Congress is not united in its desire to impeach – it might functionally make this particular attempt at impeachment impossible, but not in general. If anything, it suggests that mostly-partisan impeachment where there is not significant public pressure may be infeasible; but that strikes me as mostly a good thing, not a bad thing, or at least an “expected by the system” thing.
It kind of reminds me of Deflate-Gate in the NFL. Tom Brady was accused of deliberately deflating balls to make them easier to grip. The NFL demanded to see his text messages with the ballboys. Tom Brady said “Nope, sorry, I disposed of every one of those devices permanently about three days ago, no texts for you.” The NFL suspended Brady four games for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. (Incidentally, the overall fan split on which party was in the wrong on that suspension shows that it is hard to get unanimity on a controversial situation like that).
If they can cite something in the House rules requiring that, sure. Otherwise, they can only rule that way if they want to rip up Article I, Section 5 and jump up and down on the pieces.
???
Just say that justice and the Constitution require impeachment not being impossible, so for any X that “functionally makes impeachment impossible”, X is obstruction of justice. So make OoJ your article of impeachment.
Look, I know and you know what happens when the House votes for impeachment solely on the grounds that the President didn’t produce the documents they subpoenaed.
The conversation becomes about what a terrible overreach of power this is by the Democrats and how they wanted him gone from the start, they have no evidence of anything wrong, etc. etc.
C’mon, people. I was born at night, but not last night. This claim of “No, no. This is totally a valid reason to impeach and remove” rings hollow.
Yes, it’s a valid reason to impeach. No, it doesn’t resolve the underlying issue.
I don’t see a lot of angst here for the SC. As I said in my second-level post, the House can set whatever rules it wants. I think that’s been understood precedent since, I dunno, Andrew Johnson. House rules can very easily include “ignored our formal subpoenas”, watch Trump do that, hold their vote, the ayes have it, and in the eyes of the SC, Wikipedia, and history, Trump has now been impeached. The House can even issue formal subpoenas, watch Trump sort of half-ignore them in a deniable way, decide this is sketchy, vote, ayes have it, Trump is impeached.
Whether this will look “good” in the eyes of the people is an interesting question, in the sense that we can expect historians to be debating it for the next 150 years, using evidence such as what happened in job approval polls, Congress approval polls, how high ranking an official got scapegoated, the fact that Trump got re-elected, the fact that he didn’t, the fact that the House flipped, the fact that it didn’t, etc. And that’s probably a more weighty concern to Pelosi than whether Wikipedia adds another row to its list-of article.
If you want to argue in a more ideal sense, I’d start by asking whether obstruction of justice can stand as a test for decades to come. Suppose we have Warren in 2021, but the House flips in the 2022 midterms, and the Republicans promptly find something plausibly sketchy about Warren at the same time that she’s in the middle of pushing landmark legislation. They issue subpoenas. She refuses. They impeach. Will it stick?
If it would, then we’re done; OoJ becomes one of the go-to terms for impeachment, right under lying under oath to a grand jury, and woe unto the Executive who even looks like they are. If it won’t stick, then OoJ is a subjective, political term, and if we suspect it might fail like that, then it’s better to find something stickier.
Regardless, I think the SC gets to sit back and tell the House it’s their problem.
That wasn’t the original question, as has been repeated multiple times.
The question was about a blanket refusal to comply with subpoenas, which Trump is claiming. He isn’t half-ignoring them, nor in a deniable way. He is making up broad, new, ludicrous legal claims.
And as I repeated multiple times, this presents a non-problem for the SC. I invite you to check my comment again. I answered the question, and even headed off what I think is a plausible hypothetical (that of Trump suddenly deciding to heed part of the subpoena in some way, like he did with the pseudo-transcripts of the Ukraine talks).
@Paul Brinkley:
You keep couching the issue of congresses subpoena power as if it is intimately tied to the power to impeach:
Congresses subpoena power is not dependent on, nor subordinate to, its impeachment power. They are wholly separate, being linked only in that they both spring from the legislative function of congress. The administration is refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas and inventing new quasi-legal arguments to maintain they don’t have to comply with these subpoenas. Those quasi-legal arguments include a rejection of what you have already stated, that congress has the right to an impeachment process entirely of its own choosing.
The hypothetical you continue to reject is that the administration continues to maintain this stance, the stance that it has no requirement to comply with subpoenas.
Would SCOTUS (which what I assume you mean with the initialization SC) rule that the administration must comply? Or would they rule that this is a matter for Congress to resolve? What happens if the Congress attempts to actually enforce a contempt ruling with imprisonment?
If SCOTUS were to rule that the remedy for congress in the case of an executive branch failure to comply with a subpoena is reduced to impeachment and removal, then the subpoena power would be effectively neutered.
If the SC rules that the White House doesn’t have to cooperate with an impeachment “inquiry” doesn’t that just mean that someone has to introduce a formal measure of impeachment, charges to be filed later, and then the WH does have to cooperate with the resulting hearings.
What’s happening now is quibbling over whether an “inquiry” counts as the same. It’s clearly an attempt by the WH to kick the can down the road or force the Democrats to initiate actual impeachment. The fact that Pelosi did not call a vote to set up the “inquiry” indicates that she is afraid of the consequences, as all previous impeachments have started with inquiries voted by the entire House.
(Just guessing about “fear.” Alternatively she hopes to drive Trump out without an impeachment, or push the whole process closer to the election if that fails, before formally introducing articles of impeachment. For some reason, many seem to believe that if impeachment is started but fails relatively soon, people will have forgotten about it by November 2020. Seems implausible to me.)
An impeachment “inquiry” without a formal connection to an actual impeachment resolution or whatever can’t be construed as a “legislative purpose,” no legislation being involved. This is clearly a legal stretch but it’s not utterly implausible. If the SC agrees, then all the House has to do is formally call for impeachment and begin the process, then the rules of getting information change. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the actual impeachment charges can be determined while the process is going on.
@FormerRanger:
Legislation doesn’t start with a vote of the full House. The idea that somehow the House has to vote to start an inquiry to somehow have legislative purpose is a canard, in my eyes.
And again, the subpoena power of Congress is not limited to impeachment inquiries. Legislative committees regularly issue subpoenas without any bill being under formal consideration, AFAIK.
I’m not. I’m saying the House is permitted to tie them together. Or leave them independent. I don’t see why you think this is so fraught. To repeat: the House has the power to set whatever rules it wishes to declare impeachment. The White House can argue against this all it likes. SCOTUS barely has to weigh in. It’s cut and dried. The House would need SCOTUS to come over and rule it has impeachment power about as badly as it would need SCOTUS to come over and affirm that there are seven Articles.
Huh?? I don’t care what the Trump administration says in this case. They could call “no touchbacks” as their argument for all I care. It doesn’t matter. If the House says he’s impeached, he’s impeached.
Yes, by SC I mean SCOTUS. SCOTUS would rule that the President has to comply with impeachment, but see above. SCOTUS might rule that the President has to comply with a subpoena, and I suppose that’s an interesting question, but it wasn’t the one I was answering, which was whether ignoring a subpoena is an impeachable offense. It is, but so is Trump chucking a tomato at the Speaker. The House gets to set that rule, if it wants. If Congress attempts enforce a contempt ruling with imprisonment, I suppose that’s an academically interesting question, too, but why would Congress bother, when it has impeachment power?
What is imprisonment to you, if not effectively impeachment / removal? Do you envision the Chief Executive continuing to execute his duties from a minimum security cell? Meet with heads of state there? Negotiate trade deals from a prison laptop? Attend war game exercises with the Joint Chiefs? Do you envision the people seeing him as effective in that situation? A modern day Eugene Debs?
FWIW, in my eyes as well. If Pelosi wants to inquire, she can. And she knows that. Indeed, she probably already has staffers inquiring, looking for enough evidence to persuade actual voting House members that they should vote to inquire even more.
My guess is that she wants the inquiry to have weight in the eyes of the people, by being able to produce a list of how many Representatives put their formal name on the inquiry list. That in turn will lend weight in other House members’ minds that they should vote to impeach, if or when that impeachment vote happens, or lend weight in the people’s minds that their representatives should have voted to impeach, which means they should not vote for Trump in an actual general election. Which accomplishes one of her primary goals, without having to rely on the Republican-controlled Senate.
I missed the part where you were a lawyer, but I’m pretty certain you’re not a Senator, so it isn’t your eyes that matter. And I don’t think you’re doing a terribly good job of looking at this through Senatorial eyes.
Which are the only ones that matter. If Trump ignores the subpoenas and tells his people to ignore the subpoenas and tells the AG not to prosecute the people who ignore the subpoenas, then this is all a bunch of hot air and we don’t need your extra dose of that. Unless the Senate is willing to impeach Donald Trump for ignoring subpoenas. It is not implausible that the Senate might do this.
But the twenty Republican Senators they’ll need for that, will be looking real hard for excuses not to. The House will have to hand them an, er, unimpeachable case for impeachment, for that to happen. Letting Trump say “…but I’d have complied with the subpoenas if they were part of a legitimate impeachment process, only they weren’t because mumble something process matters”, gives GOP Senators the excuse they need to blame everything on Nancy Pelosi and satisfy both their Trumpist and NeveTrump constituents by doing nothing.
Seems like the underlying issue is just that impeachment is ultimately about votes in the House and Senate. IMO, Trump is the third successive president to deserve impeachment and removal from office (and the previous two were much less ambiguous), but that didn’t matter, because there weren’t the votes in Congress to impeach, let alone remove from office. Bush oversaw an illegal mass-surveillance program that eventually got reported in the NYT; Obama had US citizens assassinated on no authority but his own. Didn’t matter–what mattered was the vote counts. Enough Congressmen were on board with that stuff that impeachment wasn’t possible.
Probably most presidents do some things that are impeachable in the sense that they’d pass the smell test for plausible reasons to impeach and wouldn’t look like a joke. But very few do things that actually cause the impeachment vote to take place.
That
…
is
…
not
…
the question.
The question is what happens when the House issues a subpoena.
Why do you keep answering the question “Can the House impeach someone?” when the actual thing that is happening right now is that the White House is is positing a general right to refuse to respond to subpoenas.
I swear.
Well, at least John is now getting to the crux of the matter.
The Trump administration is currently in the process of potentially nullifying the ability of the legislature to subpoena the executive. That’s where the potential crisis lies.
This new, this is novel. It’s potentially a big issue.
There were two questions. I’ve helpfully repeated them below. Bolded is the one I answered.
Stop saying it’s not the question. It is one of them. It’s just not the question you want to be important.
Perhaps you’ve let this get to you unduly?
Yes, you have said it is impeachable.
But you also answered that as if it were the the “constitutional crisis” question. Which it was not.
The fact that Congress can impeach doesn’t answer the question as to whether the Congressional power of subpoena is under threat.
As John helpfully laid out, the nature of the two party system (made essential by the first past the post system) means that impeachment very well may not serve to protect that power when applied to the executive branch.
No.
From my poorly-remembered days studying poli-sci, the concept of constitutional crisis arises when there is no established and/or enforceable mechanism for power to be used compatible with the existing structure of government. For example, prior to the passage of the 25th Amendment it was unclear who would be in charge in the event that both the President and Vice President died.
There’s been no usurpation of power by the President (at least, more drastic than the action taken by the past century’s worth of Presidents). The Feds aren’t out detaining members of Congress or the Courts.
You are welcome to argue that Trump’s policies are ugly, terrible and possibly damaging to the republic. You are also welcome to argue that Trump has violated the law or norms in such a way that he should be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. But in both cases there is well-defined procedure in-place to handle it.
So no constitutional crisis. Just politics as (un)usual.
This can easily become a crisis if the administration continues to claim blanket immunity to oversight. There is no clear way for congress to enforce their subpoenas.
They can impeach him for refusing to obey subpoenas. That’s a clear way to enforce them.
… sure. But that’s a little like having a criminal code where the only available punishment is capital. And if Pence is then elevated to the Presidency it doesn’t resolve the underlying failure to comply with the subpoena.
Let me put it this way, that way lies madness.
@HeelBearCub
But then we’re not really in a Constitutional Crisis. We’re in a power struggle between the Legislative and Executive where the Legislative is blinking (and has been blinking for the last hundred years, more or less).
The Constitution has a clear remedy here, which is that the Legislative can absolutely inflict its will on the Executive, but the Executive is betting they won’t.
And President Pence would probably be a lot more willing to comply if the penalty is another impeachment and President Pelosi (who would comply).
The framers viewed that the House and the Senate would be “on the side of” the Congress. They (perhaps somewhat understandably) didn’t foresee how party politics would subsume this kind of check and balance. The especially couldn’t anticipate the kind of national ideological coalitions made possible by instantaneous national broadcast media.
That’s really not Congress “blinking”. It’s something else altogether.
Half-disagree. You could also say it’s the paperwork version of a suspect getting shot or tazered and dying of a heart attack while resisting arrest.
The punishment for conviction on impeachment is removal from office. You terminate their office as a direct result, rather than indirect. Not following at all what you mean.
I mean, if you think of subpoenas as like a police request to come down to the station with the police for an interview and not following the subpoena as being like running away in response (or worse fighting back), then impeachment in response is like if the police tazering the fleeing suspect. Shooting is probably not the best analogy since police aren’t supposed to do that in that situation.
I see your point about direct vs indirect since at least with a tazer, you probably don’t die, but I view the difference as more a matter of degree.
I’m not sure if my analogy is more or less flattering to the Trump administration, but you get the gist.
@HeelBearCub
Sure, that’s the reason they’re blinking (and have for prior confrontations on both sides, like spending money without appropriation, de facto declaring war without Congress, etc). Both parties are to blame for this.
But because we identify the reason for the blinking doesn’t change what is actually happening, which is that the Legislative keeps blinking.
It doesn’t make a Constitutional Crisis by the common definition, which is that the Constitution doesn’t have a means for dealing with it.
@EchoChaos:
The problem still exist because in the world where Congress doesn’t “blink” (and I have issues with that word), you still have an unresolved problem vis-a-vis the mechanisms afforded them to obtain the compliance of the executive. They have a nuclear weapon and no conventional ones.
… and the only winning move to that silly game is not to play. Which is what the dance between the executive and legislative branches for last 225 years has been. Mostly politicians (both legislative and executive) have recognized the danger of that game and avoided playing it.
@HeelBearCub
There are two problems.
Problem one is that the Constitution gives the Legislatures all sorts of conventional weapons that they have ceded to the Executive. For example, they control the purse strings and the Executive can’t spend any money they haven’t appropriated. Except the Executive did that and they didn’t do anything. Only they have power to declare war. Except the Executive did that and they didn’t do anything. All the conventional weapons have turned out to be useless because Congress hasn’t had the courage to fight back.
Problem two is that using the final nuclear weapon against your own party when he is CLEARLY wrong turned out to be a lot more damaging to the rest of your party than expected. If Ford had won in 1976, I suspect there would be a lot more willingness to impeach clearly bad Presidents of your own party.
But Congresses (of both parties!) have seen that enforcing these norms means that you lose political power to push for the goals you genuinely hold, so they are willing to hold their nose and accept the weakening of those norms because to do otherwise would allow the other party to do other party stuff that you don’t like.
They could use the inherent contempt power. There was a rather clever suggestion of Rudy Giuliani in the Times which would neatly skirt escalating the Constitutional conflict, since he isn’t an executive branch official.
… which still leaves us with the problem of how they would enforce that citation of contempt.
The US Capitol Police.
Obviously it would be hindered if Trump sent all relevant officials to Montana, but that LE agency is under Congressional control.
@Clutzy:
Interesting, thought.
But I have a feeling that they wouldn’t enforce an arrest warrant issued by congress. That’s just a feeling, mind you.
I’m curious if you have any citation to the contrary. The conversations I have seen around this all revolve the Seargent at Arms of the House being tasked with the job. That role merely sits in the board of the Capital Police and isn’t (AFAIK) in the chain of command.
Or just sent Paul.
HBC, I agree that I dont think there is any precedent for them doing stuff. But its a theoretical possibility.
From my understanding, the founders were way more enthusiastic about impeachment (particularly of cabinet officials and judges) than has ended up being the case. Like, they would have removed almost the entire 9th Circuit because they are “wrong” so often, and expected several presidents to have been removed by now.
Also, at the founding this was a more threatening system to the President, because the 2nd place person is VP. So impeaching Trump gives President Clinton, impeaching Obama = President Romney, etc.
With a duly authorized arrest warrant in hand, the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives could apply for extradition from a friendly state government. The contemptor to be delivered by the LEO of the extraditing state to the House.
Or he could issue a writ of posse comitatus.
Duly authorized by whom?
That’s a serious question. I don’t believe they currently would consider an arrest warrant sworn by the House, because it’s not something the House does.
If there was an arrest warrant sworn by a judge, yes.
I guess there is the possibility that the House could seek a warrant from a judge on the charge of contempt … but I really wonder whether the Capital Police are going to walk into State and serve it.
By the House of Representatives. There’s case law on the inherent contempt power and it includes arrests.
And anyway, getting into court in such a way that the judiciary can’t sit on it for literally years is a big part of the goal. So if there’s a request for an emergency restraining order the ball has already been moved forward.
As mentioned above, I think it makes a lot of sense to start with Rudy or someone similar rather than showing up at foggy bottom.
As noted, there are several ways to do this:
1) Impeachment. Either at the Presidential or official level.
2) Let them freeze in the dark. AKA. Cut off funding to the White House. A little less practical with Trump as he has independent assets, but he’d have to pay for his own staffing, pencils, whatever.
3) Hold up appointments/nominations/whatever until compliance has been achieved.
4) Others have noted contempt power/Sargent-at-arms. Possibly effective, but claims of Executive Privilege might still be able to raised under certain circumstances. OTOH, very practical to use to enforce subpoenas against private companies/individuals not involved with Presidential advice, but I’ve rarely heard of anybody refusing to appear before Congress that Congress really wanted to hear from.
In principle, Congress should be able to dictate to executive branch agencies because of the power of the purse. (“Oh, you don’t want to answer our demand for information? Allright, we’ll put you down for a 10% budget cut next year.”).
But this would require a lot more unity than Congress usually shows. Instead, it seems like most Congressmen feel far more loyalty and identification with their party than with the Congress as an institution.
That doesn’t work because the legislature has just as much of an interest in seeing budgets spent as the executive does. The executive branch spends those funds because that is what congress wants them to do. You are positing that Congress can cut off it’s own nose to spite it’s face.
Jim Geraghty argued that we saw something similar in the Fast and Furious investigation, where (according to JG), Congress subpoenaed documents, Eric Holder refused to produce them arguing that the investigation was politically motivated, Congress voted to hold Holder in contempt, and Holder refused to prosecute himself for it.
This is obviously higher stakes, and Congress is free to impeach Trump for not producing documents, of course.
That is an uncharitable summation of the F&F issue.
There was no blanket refusal to turn over documents or testify. The Obama admin asserted executive privilege in relation to some documents which post dated F&F after Holder had already testified 9 times on the matter.
ETA: I agree that the underlying legal question is (kind of) relevant though. There isn’t a clear mechanism to resolve the controlling power issues in a timely manner. F&F didn’t reach final legal conclusion till this last May.
However limited assertion of executive privilege was already an accepted fact. What Trump is asserting here is vastly different.
Thanks – Like EC, I’m also glad you haven’t completely withdrawn.
(FTR, I’m on semi-hiatus because I’m unusually busy).
In addition to HeelBearCub’s very insightful commentary, I’d like to note that there’s a fundamental difference between the Executive branch ignoring a subpoena produced as part of a routine investigation and ignoring one produced as part of an impeachment inquiry.
As I said above, I don’t think there is a super-special-impeachment-subpoena power. All that an impeachment inquiry does is provide an explicit reference for the “valid legislative purpose” of the subpoena.
You can subpoena your neighbor to provide testimony about an affair if it’s pursuant to a potential impeachment of an officer for engaging in illegal conduct. You can’t do it because you want to know if they were the one screwing your spouse.
Investment talk- so, all I really do with my personal funds is toggle them between a Vanguard S&P 500 Index fund, and a money market fund. (This is not retirement, which is in a Vanguard Target whatever fund, and I don’t really think about it). My personal cash has been in the money market fund for a bit now, I’m leery of a recession, and more leery of political risks. If Things Crash Bigly, I’d probably switch everything back to the index fund that day. My overall goal with personal funds is just to grow my net worth, and my risk tolerance is either average or slightly above average. But really, my money is always just in S&P 500 Index fund or the money market.
My question is- instead of the money market, should I be putting cash into various ETFs or index funds (or bond funds??) to try to get more yield? For example utilities & real estate are supposed to do well in recessions- should I aiming for higher than the 2% or whatever MM yield I get now by investing in some of those ETFs? Put some % in a gold ETF? I read say the Bloomberg ‘What To Do With $10,000 Now’ articles where various investment advisers recommend to buy this or that ETF to play the market. Should I be doing this? And just reading the business press to guess which ETFs are going to be good? I personally lack the risk tolerance for more exotic stuff like Chinese or Indian equities say, but should I be aiming for a 3-4% yield through conservative ETFs (or bonds?)
(You can presume that I fully understand EMH, passive vs. active, have read A Random Walk Down Wall Street, I don’t buy individual equities, etc.)
With the caveat that I don’t follow my own advice (at cost to myself), the traditional rule of thumb is to have 80% equity (index funds), 20% cash/bonds.
The 20% is what allows you to rebalance during a downturn.
If you were to make my mistake, is to go 50/50 equity/cash in anticipation of a downturn since 2015, you’d be a fool as well and lose out on a lot of equity gains!
You should ask yourself why you would make a better investment than people who do it full-time – there’s a reason a lot of institutional investors have shifted more and more to passive investing (well multiple, like CYA, but I digress), and there are valid reasons such as having a dissenting macro view from consensus on countries and sectors. And again, you’d be like me and have individual stocks in Turkey, China, and Argentina newly invested last year after a pro-PIGS portfolio after the second Greek bailout in 2011/2012.
Oh, and you can also try your luck as I did with preferred stock. Or QQQ (I avoided this one to my detriment because I’m irrationally bearish on tech) or try catching falling knives. These ideas have not panned out well in the post 2009 bull market 🙁
But which index funds, is my point. There’s no One Index Fund That Covers Every Asset On Earth. To choose one index is to snub many others.
Well, Warren Buffett and many other professional investors are supposedly in cash these days, so I am doing what the pros do at the moment. But I’m pro-passive investing- the question is, which index. Should I be in a conservative index/ETF as we wait out the end of the cycle/inevitable political insanity in 2020, vs. cash…. That’s the question
anyone that mimics the S&P 500 is good to go, like VOO.
Mix up CDs, VOO, and possibly QQQ and specialty funds if you’re adventurous.
I tell all my friends to keep enough liquidity to make expenses, then 20% cash/CDs, 80% VOO
The question you need to ask is how much of that money do you think that you might have an immediate need for? Because if you’re keeping it to make a house down payment or something, then you want to be more conservative. But if you’re just socking it away to make it grow, then your best bet is probably to park it in equities and ride the next recession, whenever it happens. Remember that time in market usually beats timing the market.
Also, I’d check the fees on the target date funds. Last time I looked at mine, they were .75%, about 50x what the various funds that made it up were. That’s a very high fee, enough that you might just buying one share of the target date fund and re-balance your portfolio once a year to follow it.
Agreed, but rule of thumb even for that “socking it away” money is to do the 80/20 split. No one will stop you from doing 100/0, but supposing your 100 becomes 90, your 80 would have become 72, and you can use some of your 20 to re-establish the 80/20 (buy another 1.6).
Similarly, when your 100 becomes 110, do you sell any of it? when it becomes 88/20, you again sell 1.6 of it. Think of it as a powder reserve
Edit: tax-wise, you’d just defer from investing more income in equity rather than actually sell.
I invest 100% in equities for exactly the reason cassander states. I did indeed ride out the Great Recession, and I have a lot more money because I kept all my money in equities. I am going to retire in a few years, so I may change my split so I have a year or two of living expenses in bonds or something, because a deep drop in the market could be expensive if I need to liquidate. In the meantime, 100% equities is the way to go.
You sell it when you need to spend it. And this idea that re-balancing allows you to automatically buy low and sell high is nonsensical. (Not saying you are arguing that, but I do see it a lot).
The OP is holding Vanguard target funds.
From what I read, Vanguard’s targer funds fees are just the weighted average of the underlying fund fees. Looking at the 2040 fund, the fee is currently 0.14%
I did the 90% equity/10% bonds thing with Fidelity. I have a few picked stocks (all Dividend Aristocrats), but mostly FXAIX (the 500 index). LQD (iShares iBoxx Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF) has been beating the pants off FXAIX, growing 7.22% while FXAIX now stands at only 14 cents a share higher than when I opened my account in March (0.14%).
Is there any reason not to make LQD 20% of my portfolio instead, other than tomorrow being bad timing to sell the 500?
Are you looking for diversification or are you still committed fundamentally to a barbell strategy and are just looking for a slightly better yielding (=riskier) barbell on the low risk side? It wasn’t clear.
I guess just better than a 2% MM yield, even if it’s just 3%
Cool, so the latter. Forget gold or foreign bonds. What you want a government bond fund. For that yield you’ll need to buy a long term fund.
Depends on your time horizon, how soon will you need the money? If it’s short, bonds might be your best bet, if it’s long, stocks will unless you foresee an imminent recession. See:
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/20060302_stocks.html
I personally have my money in the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund due to my concerns about an imminent popping of the stock market bubble:
https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/VBMFX
I don’t really get corporate bonds. They move with the health of the company, so it’s no real additional diversification. I’d rather have equities and treasuries to the desired risk profile than corporate bonds. What am I missing?
“They move with the health of the company”
Only to the extent that the company might default. Most companies won’t even in a recession, so there’s less risk.
Going from triple A to double A is a small change in bk risk but changes the price significantly.
There’s really no difference between personal and retirement investing, it’s the same thing (and imo target date is unnecessary because it’s so easily to replicate without incurring the 12 basis point surcharge). Also it’s stupid to get into and out of the market like that, you are pointlessly trying to play day-trader, and possibly getting raked in some small way buy bid-ask spread. Pick an asset allocation, buy according to that allocation and rebalance intermittently. (google “boglehead lazy portfolio” for some ideas)
My current strategy is this: 100% VTSAX for both retirement and personal investments, into the fund as soon as possible. I have ~12-24 months expenses liquid that doubles as emergency fund and to accrue bank bonuses.
Well, um, there are a few significant differences between personal and retirement investing- like tax treatment, say? But overall I’m getting bored with this personal finance 101ism advice that’s becoming more widespread- Just Put 100% In Equities And Don’t Think About Anything Ever. It’s obviously not ‘day trading’ (more like 1-2 year trading). And I’m pretty comfortable with my decision so far as the S&P 500 has been virtually flat over a 2 year span (up a lot this year, but only because it fell a lot at the end of last year).
The reason to play ‘year trader’ is that the losses are worse than the gains- if I lost 33% I’d need a 50% gain to get back to where I was, etc. This incentivizes being cautious and pulling my funds when we seem to be at the top of the market, and the world’s most powerful country has a clearly unstable demagogue in charge. It’s better to miss some extra return at the end of a bull run than to suffer a big loss and need a bigger return to get back…. Being conservative makes more financial sense. I think it’s OK to use our brains a bit and not just put everything into 100% equities and never think about it
I would beware making financial decision because you’re bored or excited by something.
I didn’t say 100% equities is for everyone, I said to “pick an asset allocation and stick with it”. And frankly I stand by that advice, “naive” as it may be, trying to time the market just isn’t a good idea unless you are a professional investor.
The S&P is up about 8% since december 29, 2017.
But sidereal is making a more important point. The right answer is pick something you’re comfortable and sticking with it, making change as much as possible with new new cash, not selling old assets.
Just because utilities and REITs do better than the broader market during a recession, it doesn’t mean that they’re a better investment than cash. The Vanguard Utilities ETF declined about 45% from market top to bottom in 2007, only marginally less than the Vanguard 500 ETF. Inverse ETFs are the only thing that might yield more than cash, but if you’re going to invest in one of those, you had better be damn sure the crash is going to happen exactly when you think it is.
I read say the Bloomberg ‘What To Do With $10,000 Now’ articles where various investment advisers recommend to buy this or that ETF to play the market. Should I be doing this? And just reading the business press to guess which ETFs are going to be good?
You understand the argument for why you shouldn’t pick individual equities. That argument applies equally well to trying to guess which ETF will outperform in the near future.
Yes, you can and should, although I’m unsure your reasons are the right ones.
Look at VBTLX, Vanguard’s Total Bond Market Fund. You’ll get ~3.5% annual returns with little risk. It turns out that like 66% of the bond market is US government debt, so there’s little risk the underlying asset will crash (if it does, the only worthwhile investments are cans and lead). It’s also exposed to inflation risk if the ’70’s come back but so would cash or money market funds. It’s biggest crash on record was -5%.
I moved my 3-6 month salary safety fund from cash to VBTLX and have been satisfied. My primary reason was I didn’t want inflation to eat a couple hundred dollars in value every year. VBTLX gives me 99% of the safety of a cash reserve for emergencies and I gain in real dollars instead of losing money to small annual inflation. My only big concern is that it takes 3-5 days for a sell order to go through, so if you have an instant need for $10,000 you might have some complications. I think it’s worth that issue.
Now that’s interesting. I guess I’m old fashioned – I keep my emergency funds instant-access liquid, as in “can write checks on them”. But OTOH, my emergency fund is a lot smaller than my total investments, or even my total non-tax-sheltered investments.
I’ve recently had to top up my emergency fund from longer term investments, and because I left it a bit late, I’m finding it a real PITA. (When the money from the stocks I sold on Monday finally arrives in my chequing account, I can pay several large bills that recently arrived …)
I guess I’m spolied, and this is very much a “first world problem” ;-(
I keep only about 500$ in cash. I figure I can pay for anything I have an immediate need for with my credit card, and if there’s a sudden bill I can’t pay for with a credit card, I’ll just wait a few days to pay it.
First a disclaimer that I just do this as a hobbyist, not an expert. I did some analysis a few months ago for my own personal investment fun.
On my shortlist of funds/ETFs going by 10 year average return net expenses considering Sortino/Treynor ratios (they’re all Vanguard funds):
Health Care VGHCX
International Explorer VINEX
Explorer VEXPX
Wellington VWELX
Utilities VUIAX / VPU
Consumer Staples VCSAX / VDC
If considering slowing future economic growth or stagnation, Health Care, Utilities, and Consumer Staples would probably be decent.
I pulled the last 25% of our retirement account that was in equities this past week and am 100% in US treasuries for that account. Giving an accurate breakdown of our ‘wealth’ is difficult since a lot of it is tied to our rental property which we can’t sell without selling our house (which makes it both hard to realize but also gives few comps in the area so even hard to estimate a sale value). Ball park current sale price of our house+rental minus mortgage remaining is 50-70% of our assets, with our retirement fund and gold the rest, at current values the retirement fund is ~1.4x the size of the gold position.
The rental situation gives us a substantially different risk profile than your average person. If we retire with the house paid off and still living in our half we will have only repairs as housing expenses plus (in today’s dollars) ~ $10,000 in income which is roughly equal to ~$30,000 a year in pre tax income, which is about halfway to our baseline retirement income. However this gives us a ton of local exposure, a rise in property taxes, crime etc would be really bad for us.
Mind me asking whether you were able to get a regular mortgage for your rentals, or if it’s at a higher rate because you don’t live there?
A few points:
sure if you’re happy to accept more risk. Are you really asking how can i have the same risk as money markets but get more income, as in how can I have my cake and eat it too? Worth nothing bonds can often go down or wipe out in recessions, and moneymarket funds can gate outflows. So both are still risky in event of recession.
yes they do better relative to the overall market. They will still go down during a recession and you will still suffer losses. Just not as much as tech stocks or biotech or other riskier options.
what kind of gold ETF? investing in gold is a bit of a mine field, especially for people with a little knowledge vs no knowledge. Are you going to buy one that physically holds the gold and so has to pay for carry and insurance etc. with no income being derived from the actual asset itself? Or just an ETF that synthetically matches the price of gold, in which case during a recession it’s likely to not behave like Gold at all. Why not just hold a gold miner, as in a successful company that produces some yield but who’s prospects are directly tied to gold? There’s many in the US that I know about as a UK investor. But then you’re doing companies analysis and holding an individual stock, so you’ve got specific risks there. just some things to consider.
this depends, do you think you have an edge over people who do this full time? For example, do you think healthcare and drugs in general are going to be more important in future than they are today? Great buy a biotech ETF, or possibly even an active fund since biotech is one of those sectors where companies are small and illiquid enough that you often can’t get some of the best ones investing passively. But then you’re paying more fees, having to take a more active approach reading on the biotech sector every week to make sure you’re up to date with changes etc. Sounds like a lot of work compared to your initial strategy.
Full disclosure: this is not specific advice, just posing some questions for you to consider. These are the kinds of questions I ask my friends when they ask me as an investment manager what they should do with their pensions etc. Also I’m UK based so what i would do for clients is very different to what you’ve done or are considering. To me, 100% full index S&P 500 sounds like madness.
Happy to discuss further.
Lots of people have stories about why they might have an edge over professional investors. Which ones do you find believable?
Speaking for myself, I’d say I find it believable that someone who’s reasonably highly placed in a corporation might have an edge while investing within his industry (even not counting the quasi-insider trading that I strongly suspect is common, e.g. trading in the stock of your suppliers or customers based on your firm’s information about them). I also find it plausible that doctors or scientists might be better at evaluating things like small biotech companies.
The ones told by people who got rich investing in the market.
Only worth doing if the number of people who do so is greater than you’d expect by chance (which is difficult to determine, as the chance distribution is difficult to specify).
Of people who tell you they got rich by investing, probably the biggest subgroup is people who are mistaken (they don’t correctly benchmark, they just forgot about their losses or their losses “don’t count” for some reason). Then the next biggest group is people who were lucky. So trying to understand the source of someone’s edge is useful.
My view is that you should start with the efficient markets theory as your first approximation, assume that all information that everyone knows is already priced into the stock. Then look for somewhere you have an opinion you are fairly confident of that it is clear that most people do not share, and where, if that opinion is correct, it will have a large effect on a company’s value.
My standard example is Apple, just after the Mac came out. I mentioned to one of my colleagues at Tulane Business School that I was getting a Mac, and he asked why I didn’t get a PC Junior instead. I concluded that his view of the subject, based on ignorance of graphic interfaces—I had seen a video of the early Xerox PARC work—and chips (there was a reason the Mac used a CPU previously used mostly for multiuser machines—the graphic interface required horsepower the then standard machines didn’t have), would be typical of most investors.
So I bought Apple stock.
Let’s talk rice cookers and rice.
What do you like to mix it up from just varying proportions of water + white rice?
Coconut milk? regular milk? salt? spices? oils? beans? sweet potatoes?
I’ve only ever seen success with sweet potatoes
Never used a rice cooker but:
Yes, add salt to rice.
Brown rice
Basmati
Thai sticky rice
Cardamom pods
But I tend to let rice just be rice. The flavour comes from whatever I’m cooking the rice to go with.
How are you cooking rice without a rice cooker?
You can cook rice in a regular pot on the stove which would by my assumption. (You can even just do it in the microwave although I wouldn’t expect it to turn out as good as properly cooked rice).
Yeah, normal pot.
You can speed things up by starting with boiling water. (unlike with pasta)
Drain it into a seive. Rinse with a bit more boiling water if you’re feeling fancy.
Put a reasonable amount of salt into the water so it soaks into the rice.
Microwavable instant rice is a thing, but it costs more and has a worse texture.
You can do regular rice in the microwave as well, it just takes longer than instant rice (but still has a worse texture than properly cooked rice). Same with pasta.
Use a pot in your oven. The instructions – via Binging with Babish are:
I’ve found that this works great. Just fill the pot with whatever rice:water ratio is recommended for your variety of rice.
I’ve never heard of putting it in the oven. It sounds unwieldy – heating up both the stove and the oven for one pot?
The way I have cooked rice for the past fifty years or so is in a pot on the stove. I combine 3 cups of rice with about 5 cups of water (my daughter thinks better with a little more), bring it to a boil, turn it down to a low simmer, and give it twenty minutes or so to cook.
The one potential problem is rice sticking to the bottom and burning. The solution is to make sure the temperature is not too high.
For very large quantities of rice, done for SCA feasts, you bring the water to a boil, add the rice, bring it back to a boil, cover it, turn off the heat. That eliminates the burning problem, which is more serious for large quantities, and an eight gallon pot of rice retains heat well enough to cook without additional heating.
Let me join the chorus of people saying: “rice cooker?” I’ve always used a simple pot and stove and find the idea of a special gadget for cooking rice a bit odd.
With that out of the way, here’s a quick and easy method I use to cook rice that I’ve found to give good results with little effort:
1. Measure out the quantity of rice you want to cook, dump it in a sieve and rinse thoroughly (to get rid of excess starch),
2. Boil up some water in a kettle (I use an electric one, which saves time),
3. Just as the water is coming to a boil, melt a small quantity of butter (unsalted, for preference) in the pot you’ll be using to cook the rice, add the rice and stir it up for a really short time (you don’t want to fry the rice, just seal it up a bit and not have it too sticky),
4. Measure out the water you’ve just boiled in a proportion of 1 part rice, 2 parts + a bit water and pour into the pot. Keep the flame pretty high, so the water starts boiling again,
5. When the rice comes to a boil, add salt. Rice soaks up salt like a sponge, so it’s probably best to be really conservative. If you used salted butter in step 3, you can probably do without salt altogether. Stir the rice thoroughly.
6. Bring the flame down and let the rice simmer and the water evaporate. Do not cover the pot. This is a great time to work on whatever it is you’ll be serving the rice with. You may want to stir it a couple of times, to make sure it isn’t sticking to the pot.
7. Once the top layer of rice is above water level and holes have formed where the water bubbled up, take the pot off the cooker, cover it and let it steam for a bit.
Using this method, I am able to consistently get rice that is neither under nor overcooked, typically within fifteen minutes or so.
I don’t use a rice cooker either. I rinse the rice in a metal sieve before cooking, put it in a shallow heat-resistant glass cooking vessel. I add spices, most importantly lovage. I boil water in an electric kettle and add it to the rice. I cook in the microwave for 8 minutes as first pass, then quickly stir the rice and add some more water, then cook for 10 more minutes. No water remains in the container by the end, all of it is either absorbed by the rice or gets off the vessel to the microwave floor. This makes something of a mess in the microwave that I have to clean up afterwards, but also results in cooked rice. Optionally mix in green peas cooked separately before serving.
No, I’m not saying that this is a sensible method, it’s just what I do.
Does microwaving it produce higher final product that stove cooking?
No. Stove cooking also makes good rice. I find the microwave easier because I cook it until no water remains on the rice, so I don’t have to remove the excess water in the end. It’d be harder to do that on the stove without risking to burn the rice.
I defer to the only acceptable authority here the late film critic Roger Elbert.
I’ve had azuki and/or mung beans, pearl barley, and oatmeal with my rice before. And you can probably throw any kind of grain in there, too, like millet, quinoa, cream wheat/grits, etc.
There’s also the entire congee family of recipes. The basic additives I’ve grown up with are green onion, preserved egg (pidan), and ground meat.
“In Korean, it’s called “Japgokbap” meaning mixed grain rice. There is no one formula for what grains you have to use, but Koreans usually mix 5-10 different grains. Brown rice, brown sweet rice, black rice, barley, black pea, white pea, red bean, sorghum, millet, Job’s tears, buckwheat, kidney bean, white cowpea and wild sweet rice are all examples of grains Koreans enjoy. Often they mix these grains with plain white rice, because white rice gives a nice smooth texture and has a stickiness that other grains lack.”
My rice cooker also comes with a steamer accessory, which works great with veggies or fish.
I’m about to add squid ink to rice in a rice cooker. I’m concerned about it vaporizing and getting all over everything. I will see how it goes.
It didn’t stain anything, although it did make my kitchen smell like the inside of a squid. Overall, success.
If you want the aesthetics of dark rice, add about ten percent of black rice to your ordinary rice.
I’m aware of this trick, but I wanted the rice to be truly black and not purple.
I cook rice in my instant pot.
A caveat: most of the methods and ratios described here for cooking rice on a stove are only applicable to long grain rice (which includes jasmine, basmati, and most rice grown in the US).
For short or medium grain rice (the kind you get with sushi and which Japanese people eat every day) the ratios are different and getting good results without a rice cooker a lot harder in my experience.
(I use a rice cooker for short and medium grain rice while cooking long grain rice on the stove).
One yummy addition for rice in a cooker or on the stove top and which goes well with many sorts of meal, from Indian to Cajun: add a few bay leaves to the pot.
Ah… that doesn’t match my experience? My household uses medium-grain sticky rice as our default. Tastiest kind I’ve found yet, at least in my opinion, works just fine on the stove. Just under twice as much water as rice, get it to a boil stirring as needed (once or twice) to keep it from burning and then turn it off (or to low if you’re cooking way too little, but usually its own heat does it). Texture is fine without any sort of draining or rinsing, all the water gets absorbed. But it certainly doesn’t need a rice cooker; I don’t think I’ve used one yet.
You do need to know what the water/rice ratio is for your variety of rice, but I’ve had pretty good luck just consulting the quantities on the bag. And rice is pretty flexible – Dad’s 3-to-5 ratio is for the same medium-grain sticky rice, and while I like mine better (his dries out a bit faster in the refrigerator) I’m not at all sure I could tell the difference on a blind taste test.
Not quite an addition to rice, but one thing a friend of mine does with her rice cooker is to steam chinese sausage or smoked duck leg on top of the rice. This sometimes gets cut up into it, sometimes served separately, and seems to come out quite well either way.
(She also does steamed eggs, but those are in a bowl on top of the rice and are really a separate dish she’s taking advantage of having an already-running steamer for.)
Funny, based on your description I would have guessed it was too much water, especially if you turn off the heat once it reaches a boil, but there are so many factors, including the type of rice, that it’s hard to figure out how the difference in our experiences arises. It has been a long time since I cooked short to medium grain rice on the stovetop because I found it difficult to achieve the kind of fluffy texture I liked without a rice cooker. I do recall that the general principle was less water for short and medium grain as compared to long. Do you ever cook long grain rice like basmati, and if so, do you adjust your ratios or method at all for that?
If you don’t turn off the heat – or at least turn it way down and keep the lid on – it comes out crunchy, which I don’t like in my rice. Ditto if you get distracted and let it boil over, for what it’s worth.
The texture I get is – I’m not sure if I’d say fluffy, as much as definitely sticky rice? If you picked up a grain you’d get many of the nearby grains as well. I like it that way, but it may be the sticky element that’s throwing the ratios off?
I do cook basmati occasionally – I like it, though I’m not an expert at it and have never gotten it really fluffy – but it’s pretty rare and half the time it’s as part of a larger recipe, in which case I usually follow that.* I feel as if I have sometimes seen 3-1 ratios (as opposed to my 2-1 for sticky rice), adding salt, and adding butter (which is delicious but probably not wise on a regular basis). That said basmati often needs to be drained and/or rinsed, so you aren’t actually putting all that water into the rice, you’re just not letting it sit on the bottom, maybe as an alternate way of keeping it from burning.
*The other half I’m checking what’s on the package; I’d check one now but we haven’t got one. I think I’ve cooked basmati with my normal method, and if I’m remembering the time correctly it came out mostly fine, maybe a little moist but not much, but I was pretty busy that weekend and may be misremembering. I’ve definitely cooked standard American either medium- or long-grain rice with my normal method; it wasn’t great, but I never like standard American white rice anyway, and it was definitely better than when I see it in restaurants/college dining halls.
I have a family friend who buys milk in bulk and makes yogurt with her rice cooker. She optimized the process sufficiently to decide that yogurt via Instant Pot was inferior.
Has anyone had any success replacing their rice cooker with a countertop (electric) pressure cooker? I’d like to get a pressure cooker to make it faster and more convenient to cook my own beans/lentils, but since space is at a premium where I live, I’d rather replace a kitchen appliance than add one. Also would be nice if it could steam vegetables like potatoes in addition to pressure cooking beans and making good rice of the quality I’d expect using one of the “smarter” rice cookers (like Zojirushi, etc.).
I see many such all-in-one products on Amazon, but don’t know if they’re any good/which brand or features to look for. Thanks for any ideas.
The consensus is that Instant Pot really is the best deal for that. So you should find a friend who already has one and ask if you can sample some of its results.
I don’t have one, but that’s because I got the Aroma multicooker before Instant Pot got cheaper. I don’t know if it’s any faster, but it does rice quite well, and I’ve also had success with its steamer accessory and slow cooking function. Besides, speed really isn’t an issue, because it has timer+keep warm functions so that you can load up the rice and water way early and program so that it finishes cooking whenever you need it.
In the long run, I likely will upgrade to Instant Pot.
The instant pot works great for rice. We have a smaller one that mostly just cooks rice. It seems to be slightly faster than our old rice cooker.
I love my rice cooker.
Toast the uncooked rice in butter/oil and garlic/onion first in the rice cooker, then cook the rice in chicken stock instead of water.
(I.e., melt butter in rice cooker, add garlic or onion or shallot and cook briefly, add rice for a few minutes, then reset the rice cooker, fill with chicken stock, and use the rice cooker normally.)
Sounds tasty. But the odds of persuading my wife and daughter that we should crowd the kitchen counters with another gadget are low.
There is a reason only half the burners on our stove are induction.
There is no reason at all that I can see that that method wouldn’t work in a pot, Daddy dear. You are welcome to try it! It does sound tasty.
I have come to see concept of “free will” as a moralistic and not factual concept. Functionally, there are no qualifiers to sort your personality, decisions, actions or outcomes into “by choice” and “not by choice” – anything can be traced to factors beyond one’s control, or denied this trace, but in a world where eugenics and scientific racism has fallen out of favour, you can only judge people, both positively and negatively by the former, and discard the later. If you want someone punished for their shortcomings, such as being poor, lonely and depressed, (Or at least don’t want to be burdened to help them) you will proclaim that they are this way by choice, while excuse this coming from in-group because it would let you claim sympathy and assistance. The reverse for positive qualities – outgroup got there by luck, you got there by choice – people tend to attribute their success to simple, obvious choices and imply that everyone could get there if only they chose this way quite a lot.
I’m curious who else thought this way, but can’t come up with key words that would let me search this kind of discussions.
This is my view on determinism as well. Everything is the way it is because it couldn’t be any other way; concepts like “deservingness” are therefore meaningless. But this is almost a special case of not being able to derive an ought from an is. Moral ideas like justice, fairness, right, wrong, etc are all meaningless unless used in their sense as referential frame specific preferences regarding world states (e.g. I can say x is evil to mean x worldstate is low on my preference meter, but not to say anything beyond that or imply that others have any duty regarding x). I think this is called amoralism and/or error theory. Morality could mean the study of human instincts and norms surrounding our shared illusion of free will and right vs wrong, but trying to systematize or delve deeply into an illusion just exposes its immateriality.
I feel like I have a mental block understanding why this type of determinism appeals to some people. The idea that everything only happens the way it must happen seems like it implies that the universe has some kind of built-in function that takes a physical state in the past and gives you back the present and the future. By function I mean in the math sense: given the same inputs you have to get the same outputs every time.
That bugs me in three ways:
1) how is this philosophically better than the idea that there’s an mechanism that couples mental states and goals now to physical states in the future?
2) how does it even contradict the idea of such a coupling?
3) Doesn’t the idea of such a function “existing” raise a whole bunch of even more unanswerable questions that directly affect physics? Like, how is it enforced by the universe? Is it actually defined for every possible distribution of matter and energy? If not, what would happen to the universe if you could arrange a “bad” distribution?
I can’t get past the possibility that it’s actually more physically reasonable to say that the relationship between the past, the present, and the future is not described by a function. That idea rejects the hardest forms of determinism, even if it isn’t enough to prove free will is real.
It sounds like your primary concern is that some “pro-free-will” arguments seem to be aimed at ultimately justifying mistreatment, retaliation or punishment, particularly against disfavored groups. That’s probably a fair assessment for how “free will” can sometimes get deployed in bad faith as an assumption. But for me, that consideration doesn’t push me away from believing “free will” is physically sensible and possible.
1) It’s the same; not sure what you mean by “better”.
2) it doesn’t.
3) I don’t really understand this question. If you have two gears which are interleaved such that one rotates when the other rotates, would you ask how the rotation of the second gear was “enforced by the universe” upon the rotation of the first?
One thing that I believe is necessary for this view is quantum superdeterminism, but the absence of superdeterminism merely substitutes randomness at the bottom for it, so it doesn’t really enable choice as a physical fundamental.
Either way, believing in the responsibility of a person for their own actions is a means to the end of reducing the quantity of unfriendly actions.
> I don’t really understand this question. If you have two gears which are interleaved such that one rotates when the other > rotates, would you ask how the rotation of the second gear was “enforced by the universe” upon the rotation of the first?
It depends on the level of explanation I wanted. If I’m just thinking about the theory of abstract gears, then I would say there’s no “how” to explain. If I am considering a set of metal or plastic gears, now I can ask “how does gear A actually move gear B?” My explanation maybe doesn’t have to be finer grained than the properties of solids and classical physics and I can work in primitive notions like vectors and abstract forces. If instead I want to go down to fundamental particles, fields, and forces, there’s a whole bunch of questions I need answered before I can really say that I have a working theory of how one gear turns another at that level of description. What do I mean by “solid”? Why don’t teeth stick together and merge into a single piece of metal when they touch? What does “touching” mean in this setup?
I’m interpreting one system (“gears”) within another (“classical mechanics of solids”), and that one within another (“quantum field theory”). If I know all the intermediate steps, and how each intermediate layer is realized within the world of the underlying layer, then I would say we’ve got an explanation of the top layer in terms of the bottom layer. If we are missing big parts of some of the layers, or of the mapping between two layers, then we don’t have an explanation, and, more importantly, we likely don’t have a genuinely tight argument that there isn’t any explanation possible.
Probably the fairest way to describe what bugs me is this: when I try to wrap my head around “deterministic” and “random”, I don’t end up feeling like I understand them well enough to say “there is absolutely no way these lower-level concepts can contain a model of my intuition about free will.” When I hear something that sounds (forgive the strawman) like “free will is too vague to reason about, and it’s clear there’s no room between determinism and randomness for it anyway”, I’m unclear what intuition the other person is trying to express.
Those are really the only two conceivable options. It’s impossible to think beyond something either being caused to happen one way by previous things or simply happening that way for no particular reason at all, or at least it’s impossible to express anything else in English.
The problem with free will is that it’s not well defined to begin with. It’s more of a vague feeling human beings have than even a moral tool. We feel like we’re the definite author of our actions, unless we look close enough to realize that at some point things just pop into our head out of the blackbox of the unconscious mind.
> the universe has some kind of built-in function that takes a physical state in the past and gives you back the present and the future.
Isn’t that function definitionally physics?
> how is this philosophically better than the idea that there’s an mechanism that couples mental states and goals now to physical states in the future?
The former subsumes the latter? Part of that function entails mental states and goals and thereby couples them to the future
I largely agree as well.
The idea of free will always seems to be put to contribution to justify the notion of punishment, that is, not merely fixing and compensating damages and ensuring that the damaging action is prevented from reoccuring in the future, but specifically inflincting pain on the perpetrator, because “they deserved it”. It’s a thinly veiled excuse for the practice of cruelty.
Or for the practice of restraint.
If you take notions of dessert out of punishment, then there’s no reason not to inflict horrifically disproportionate punishments for minor offences if doing so would benefit society.
Well, the reason is that it doesn’t work.
Yes, you can always trace any quality of an individual back to something they have no control over. Did they achieve something by talent? They must have good genes. Did they work exceptionally hard? Either their genes or environment must have given them motivation for hard work. And so on.
A lot of the relevant social pressure comes down to possibilities for manipulating people. Consider an idiot and a smart but very lazy person, both of whom currently achieve very little. By their achievements, both could deserve the same level of society’s support. However, it’s obvious that the idiot will be useless no matter how hard he tries, while it’s more plausible that the lazy person could do something. Thus society will condemn the lazy person a lot more strongly, because it might be possible to manipulate him into being useful, but there’s little to gain by manipulating a worthless idiot.
Where a person is unquestionably bad, I agree that defenses like “he only became that way due to circumstances/environment” are wrong. Consider the following narrative:
He was born in a poor family. They lived in a racist community that treated him badly due to his skin color. The government gave all the school money to other districts, and he was thus very badly educated. Bigoted employers never gave him a real chance to get a job. In these circumstances, he grew up into a criminal and a horrible human being who fully deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life.
I think there’s a fairly large portion of people who’d protest that “deserves to rot in jail” is unfair, somehow excusing any badness if the person in question was a “victim”. But as above, anything can always ultimately be traced to some environmental influence. You can condemn other people for making someone bad (to the degree it can be said he’d have grown into a different person in different circumstances), but that doesn’t make the person himself any less bad. If you’re running a eugenics program, then it might make sense to say that he wouldn’t necessarily be genetically bad and there’s less need to stop him from having children, but I don’t think there’s any less reason to throw a genuinely bad person in jail if he became bad due to a particular environment.
I think the issue is less that the person should not go to jail than that we should realize that there is something more systemic going on in general. As your eugenics comment illustrates, we should recognize that it didn’t *have* to go that way, and that people who did not make such choices were not necessarily inherently better. And many people recognize this, but many don’t. It’s against human nature to dispense with blame altogether, but I do think awareness in this area is key to understanding the world and making constructive choices.
For example, when I was in college, the Michael Vick controversy arose. I remember sitting in class, listening to others go off on Vick. Now, I am really sensitive to the issue of animal cruelty—no one who knew me would ever question my concern in this area. Had trigger warnings been a thing then, I would have kept an eye out for that one. But I simply could not sit there and bask in superiority—if I’d grown up in a situation where I was “desensitized,” like Vick, would I still be that way? *Possibly.* There are definitely people who just find that stuff revolting, and I can’t even take watching people suffer practical jokes. But I’ve had the luxury of being able to avoid those things, too. Things like pure torture of living things are probably different, and I don’t think Vick did that–if he did, don’t tell me about it! I know most of my classmates must have been less sensitive on this issue, and hearing them go off on him just made me uncomfortable. They were way too certain that they would never have made that choice in any circumstances—which means they have other blind spots that might manifest. You can believe something is terrible, and also realize that the person didn’t really choose it among an array of options equally available to everyone. And also that maybe this can be addressed, to prevent it from happening. It’s not an issue that gets solved by going after individual people after the fact, regardless of whether the individual should be jailed.
I just kept thinking that if Vick had instead turned out to have a history of beating girlfriends senseless and terrorizing his ex wife, he would have served far less jail time and would not have become a pariah.
Nietzsche was well known for the “free will is an excuse to blame people” theory.
Determinism does not mean powerlessness – it is the source of power.
Determinism simply means that every action is entirely the result of causes – and the most important cause is you. You have a biology, a personality, and an environment – these determine your actions.
If free will is opposed to determinism, then “free will” declares that an action is not entirely the result of causes – that there is some aspect of a decision that is not responsive to biology, personality, or environment. But this “free” aspect, being so unresponsive, is arbitrary.
So, if “I” did something, this can only mean that my biology, personality, and/or environment determined that action. If I took an action in an undetermined and “free” manner, it was not dependent upon my biology, personality, or environment, and therefore “I” did not do it.
In this way, we can see that blame and credit depend not on free will but on determinism, for it only makes sense to attribute an action to a person if they actually did it. If our wills are free, then we cannot receive blame or credit because our actions are essentially arbitrary.
This does not need to alter our systems of praise and punishment. If a method works – even retributive justice can work – then it is worthwhile.
All models lie, some models are useful. People having free will is a useful model for influencing and predicting and understanding their behavior. This is true, even if there are some frames of reference in which people don’t really seem to have a lot of free will.
Peoples’ actions being mostly determined by their circumstances is also a useful model for influencing and predicting and understanding peoples’ behavior. This is true, even if there are some frames of reference in which people really do seem to exhibit something like free will.
When is it useful to model people’s actions as arbitrary?
Determinism isn’t a model.
I thought it was one of my favorite models, and I think reasonably close to true or likely to be true!
Please explain what you mean by “Determinism isn’t a model”. I am intrigued.
Me too!
Models are descriptions of reality – maps – and as such, every model is incomplete. We have various ways of stating that : think of Goedel’s incompleteness theorems, or Goodhart’s law, or Hoelmstrom’s theorem, or our shibboleth that “the map is not the territory.” These laws (and others like them) are restatements of one fact : no system of axioms can completely describe a natural reality. As such, axiomatic systems can be challenged and even defeated.
In contrast, determinism at its heart is simply “the natural world is sufficient to account for its actions.” So, though the various flavors of determinism are axiomatic systems, determinism itself is not – instead, determinism designates the natural world as the subject or target of valid axiomatic systems. It represents an organizing discipline.
So saying that determinism competes with free will is like saying that phlogiston theory competes with physics. It is not that phlogiston theory is simply incorrect – it is that when axiomatic systems within physics are successfully challenged, physics is illuminated and refined, and is therefore strengthened as incorporates challenges, not weakened. You can’t posit something parallel to of physics and yet prevent physics from claiming that thing as its own.
tl;dr : models describe subjects, disciplines designate the subject to be described ; determinism is a discipline.
(Also “all models are wrong, some models are useful” in this context is a trumped-up way of saying, “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Which is dumb, and a capitulation, and deserved to be clapped back at.)
ETA: this may deserve a better description than I can muster on a first attempt.
That just sounds like a metamodel to me. It’s a model for studying other models or generating other models. I think metamodels are still models.
I don’t see that enough is gained by this separation of models and disciplines. Models may model other sets of models or serve as as strategy for generating other models. It is not uncommon to stack models.
Although from a logical point of view, there are probably paradoxes if you’re careless about how you set up axioms for metamodels. The same way dealing with sets logically is messier than just dealing with predicate logic.
Ehh… that’s not really it. Meta-models do help select between models, but, meta-models still need organizing disciplines.
Another example : the discipline is “we will cross the river.” The models are “swim,” “canoe,” “ferry,” “bridge,” “hang glide.” The meta-models are “go through the water” and “go over the water.”
Any or all of the models could be effective or ineffective and the discipline would remain.
The discipline is what organizes the models and ultimately what selects among them.
Van Inwagen calls this the Mind argument, due to the number of times it has appeared in that journal.
That’s intriguing!
I am merely an amateur. There must be better descriptions of the argument than mine, and there must be good critiques of it, too. You seem familiar – can you point me to some of those? It would be great to learn more.
I’ll search for Van Inwagen , too.
Honestly, I think surprisingly little has been added to what Hume had in his chapter “Of Liberty and Necessity” in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But Nietzsche was on to something with his allusion to the “hundred times refuted” theory of free will, that there is always someone new who thinks he is strong enough to refute it (not that the previous refutations failed, either in truth or in Nietzsche’s opinion; it’s kind of strange the way it nonetheless keeps attracting new refutations). In any event, for a complicated discussion, van Inwagen thinks there are strong reasons to believe 1) free will exists, 2) determinism is incompatible with free will, and 3) indeterminism is incompatible with free will. He’s not the kind of weasel who thinks there’s some third way apart from determinism or indeterminism, either; he recognizes that 1-3 can’t all be true. And he is personally least confident of 3, and so remains one of the most prominent advocates of a libertarian position, but he refreshingly admits that he has no argument that 3 is false, nor even much of a response to the arguments that 3 is true. He just believes that the cases for 1 and 2 are stronger, so if one has to be given up, it should be 3 (I disagree; I have little difficulty rejecting 2). In any event, van Inwagen seems to have a relatively recent new book about the subject (just came out in 2017) which I haven’t read.
Thanks Protagoras!
Ah yes, CW thread. Was wondering why it’s so much less interesting.
Anyways, to be a bit more constructive. Something that’s been churning in the back of my head, what with Scott’s almond post and Lord Voldemort’s recent article and other comments here. I’ve had to make the choice this year if I want to get involved in politics. It was going to be a “no”, the main reason being that my business is in a sensitive-but-good period and I can’t afford the distraction, and also in a couple of years I may actually afford both the time and a little money. But recently I’m starting to go with “no, because that’s not where the power is”.
Follow me here for a bit. So, I’m an entity that wants to effect a change. I’m ideologically agnostic, I don’t have big ideals or goals – I just want my itch scratched. Does it really make sense to get involved in elections? Thinking about it with a practical focus, it kinda feels like planting a tree to get the wood to make the pen I need to write a couple of pages. Investing (time, money, influence) in a non-incumbent candidate means 1. waiting a long time 2. taking a chance he won’t get elected 3. take a chance he’ll remember my help 4. take a chance he’ll be able to help – and whatever is left gets divided between his/her other supporters and whatever’s left of his principles. Not a bright investment, if you ask me.
To this I contrast the question (again from here, I think) of who actually writes legislation. The letter of the law. Not legislators, they’re too busy and non-juridically educated to do it. Technically their aids, but can they really afford top help? In practice at least the rough draft is written by … the industry. Who give it to the aids, who give it to the legislators, who negotiate it in committees usually by comparing with the drafts from the other guy’s aids etc.
What follows here is that we have demand and – probably – supply, so there’s bound to be a market somewhere. I don’t expect anybody to just tell me where it is – it probably varies a lot by country anyways, after all there are pretty clear differences in how well things work based on general corruption level. But after the whole Thiel-Gawker thing, I don’t consider Conspiration a taboo word anymore. In any case, my guess is that if/when I’ll feel like Getting Involved, politics won’t be the most effective use of my time.
Start small. Join a couple community orgs. After a year of active participation, it should be extremely easy to get on the board of something.
That will be valuable because you’ll get a change to direct impact in your community AND you’ll get a leaders-eye-view of the decision making process. I think the big realization is that most decisions aren’t about high-pressure lobbying. Instead, they’re a handful of basically people trying to muddle their way to a reasonable solution to some problem.
I suspect the big way to have impact (with individual-level-resources) is to identify some small-ish problem, construct a complete solution, and have the community connections to be able to present it to your local city council or town planner.
Sometimes, but I’ll bet executive branch agencies write a lot more of it. And “industry” in this case should include activist groups of all kinds. So the demand is being met by a lot of groups already.
Yeah, that’s my point. Well, actually that’s the reverse of my point – the politicians make up the demand and the industry-in-the-larger-sense supplies the law writing services. Sounds a lot cleaner when you put it this way. But anyways, it’s still a market, and for an actor that wants to make a change it’s much better to tap into it than get involved in elections.
And the thing is, compared to regular politics, it’s incredibly opaque. I don’t think it’s necessarily on purpose, it’s just that navigating any moderately complex environment requires a small amount of skill, and this kind of skill is really not widespread. While politics is discussed at every bar and on every corner, and pretty much everybody (claims) to have at least some expertise.
“Getting involved in politics” means basically one of three things:
1.) Run for office
2.) Get involved in government (lobby your Senator, serve as a surrogate, etc etc)
3.) Join or create a political organization
3 is generally the lowest impact because you get to set your terms and you don’t have to compromise. However, it’s also the hardest to do successfully. You’re basically creating a new company but instead of making money it organizes voters and pays people to communicate their wishes. If you want to get involved, I’d pick an issue you care about and see if you can get a popular newsletter going around it. If you can, then start trying to organize the demographic the newsletter reaches with donations etc and start communicating with government entities about their desires.
If you want power and are ideologically agnostic, the bureaucracy is the place to be. For the US, if you become a member of the Senior Executive Service, you have tremendous power to make changes within your domain with very little oversight. You would report to a political, but that political usually has 0 interest in anything you do that is not ideological, and only orders you to implement their ideology, while letting you choose the methods.
The big disadvantages are that you won’t be able to change law, and it’s a full time career that is moderately difficult to get. It works best for someone that wants to exercise their power through countless small actions every day, that concretely effect a few people, rather than through one big action. If you want to make a few big changes, than industry or lobbying is probably more effective.
My intuition is that for almost everyone, getting involved in national-level politics is about the least efficient way possible to make the world a better place. Doing some kind of local volunteer work, building something useful in your work/career, being part of a community, even just helping that one friendless crazy little old lady down the street now and then, all make the world a better place with high probability and low effort. National level politics is the opposite–vast efforts on your part are a tiny drop in the ocean and will almost certainly have no impact on the outcome.
Funny question on stack exchange:
In the twin paradox does the returning twin also come back permanently length contracted flatter than the twin on earth?
You are in a Magic draft. When you have almost finished building your deck, you realize that you really need to add one more creature in the CMC 2 slot. Under typical conditions, which of these would you prefer?
– a 2/2 with reach
– a 2/2 with trample
– a 2/2 with haste
– a 2/2 with lifelink
– a 2/2 with deathtouch
– a 2/2 with flying
– a 2/2 with hexproof
– a 2/2 with first strike
– a 2/2 with unblockable
– a 2/2 with flash
– a 3/2 with no keyword abilities
– a 2/3 with no keyword abilities
To begin with, I’m guessing a 3/2 is preferable to a 2/3, because offence is more important than defence. So which of the others come before the 3/2, which fall between the two, and which are worse than a 2/3?
My estimate for better than a 3/2:
– haste
– deathtouch
– flying
– first strike
– unblockable
Between a 3/2 and a 2/3:
– trample
– hexproof
– flash
Worse than a 2/3:
– reach
– lifelink
It depends on how you plan to win and what the format is like. If there are a lot of 2/2s and the format is kind of aggro, a 2 cmc 2/3 could be great. If you want to win via beat down quickly, the 3/2 is better than everything but unblockable, flying, first strike, and maybe haste (in that order).
Death touch is only sometimes better than a 3/2, and those times are if want or expect to be defensive.
You left off vigilance, but vigilance and trample are both pretty lousy on a 2/2, maybe reach as well–unless the format has lots of 1/1 flying tokens or something. Hexproof only matters on a weak creature if there are good auras in the set.
My biggest disagreement with you is lifelink. I would rather have lifelink than haste. It’s right about on par with the extra point of power, because if you end up racing an opponent who also has small creatures you’ll come out ahead. I think you also underestimate flash. A flash creature can often fill the role of a removal spell, even if small; if you have a 2/2 and they have a 3/3, you can flash in the 2/2 and double block, trading up. And it is great if you plan on holding up mana for counter spells or defensive tricks (which, yeah, aren’t great in limited, but part of that is because it’s usually so costly to spend a turn holding mana up).
Synergy with your other picks seems more important than almost all of these, and possibly more important than filling a CMC 2 slot.
Flying or unblockable; pretty much always. Maybe I’d lean into deathtouch of one of the other defensive keywords if I’m playing control, but even then getting to drop something that says “You will die in (lifetotal / creature power) turns” is pretty good.
Trample is weak on a 2/2, as is haste (imo) and hexproof unless I have auras. I’m a bit of a contrarian on lifegain, I think it’s underrated by many veterans.
My order is like
Unblockable, Deathtouch, Flying, 3/2, first strike, 2/3, lifelink, haste, flash, reach, hexproof, trample
2/3 can be better than 3/2 in a format full of grizzly bear.
Veterans tend not to like cards that only gain life or delay/chump, but they’re totally down for some incidental lifegain. I would play an extra land over Gain 6 Life, but would happily play a 2/2 Gain 3 Life.
If it’s not important to your deck (as it hopefully shouldn’t be if it’s your last pick), and a “matches with other cards/strategy in this deck” is too much of a copout, then generally deathtouch for removal or flash for tricks, then possibly first strike for raw muscle.
A lot of these are really only meaningful in numbers/strategy. A lone 2 coster won’t do much.
The defensive strength of a 2/3 is very dependent on the format’s “magic toughness”. <4 CMC creatures tend to cluster at a certain power in formats, whether that's from a frequently used token or a mechanic that requires a certain body size, and if your defensive creature can no-sell those creatures it looks way better. In Return to Ravnica most of the good cards were 3/Xs and so the magic toughness was 4, so mister 1/4 reach was an obnoxiously good defender even without the regenerate ability. If the magic toughness is 3 a 2/3 can be way better than a 3/2, but if the magic toughness is 4 then you’d want the 3/2 (or even a 3/1) so it can at least trade up.
————
Flying and Unblockable are great on a bear, that’s a one mana discount from the 3cmc where they’re already pretty good. Deathtouch is also very nice, 1/1 deathtouchers are already quite annoying and a 2/2 would have an even better nickel-and-dime “God I don’t want to block the 1/1 with my 3/4 but…” mode. All three are relevant bodies in late game stalls, which is super nice to have on your 2 drops.
Haste is great in aggro but kinda meh in more controlly-midrange and control, and unlike the three above it’s not super relevant late game. I’d take the 3/2 in a vacuum.
First Strike varies from decent to bonkers depending on the format’s magic toughness (magic power?). There’s some formats where all the good 3 drops and half the 4 drops are X/2s and this totally owns the board, and there’s formats where everything above 2 mana is a 1/3 or 2/3. It’s hard for first strike to be outright bad though, it plays nicely with any sort of pants (+1/+1 counters, auras or equipment) or combat tricks.
Reach is format and deck dependent. Sometimes fliers go wide and blocking 1/1 spirits are super important (Ravnica Allegiance), sometimes the fliers are all X/3s at 4 mana and white/blue isn’t that good anyway.
Hexproof is great if the pants (counters+auras+equipment) in the format are great. Otherwise people tend not to aim kill spells at vanilla 2/2s, though it’s a nice perk.
Lifelink has traditionally been alright on 2/X 2 drops. Again, sometimes the magic toughness is 3 and the 2/3 is way better, sometimes that doesn’t matter and the 2-6 life. Nice in aggro racing situations.
Flash is fine for futzing with combat math or punting on decisions. Again, magic toughness dependent.
Trample is mostly irrelevant on a 2/2, they’re just not getting chumped by 1/1s that often and the extra point from trading w/ an X/1 tends to be marginal.
—–
In summary: I’d almost always want the flying+unblockable+deathtouch over the 3/2, first strike is format dependent and may or may not beat out the 3/2. Haste is good in aggro and meh outside, hexproof+flash+lifelink+reach vary wildly on format and may or may not be better than the 2/3, trample is pretty close to a vanilla 2/2.
For clarity’s sake, by magic toughness you mean 1 point above the typical common and uncommon creature’s power, right?
Correct, it’s the toughness that blocks most of the “relevant” creatures.
I’d also factor in the most common red removal (if it’s a set with cheap red removal) into the “magic toughness” as well.
IE, in a set with lightning bolt, you want 4 toughness creatures. In a set with shock, you want 3.
Another example of this is Dragon’s Maze, which was made to integrate into RtR & the very fast Gatecrash sets, and in an effort to slow the format down had a common cycle of common 4 cmc 2/4 creatures that benefited from having gates in play.
So, let’s talk for real about the NBA and China.
Is what China did defensible, and on what grounds? Is the NBA’s response defensible, and if so how? Is the NBA hypocritical, given its usual costless public wokeness? Should America stand by while China uses our companies’ profit motives to distort and censor our public square—and if not, what exactly should we be doing about it?
If the situation were reversed, and a foreign power’s international media began supporting a seriously disruptive protest movement in our country, and the US government said “no intervening” and banned that foreign company from expressing its views on our soil, I think most people would find that reasonable. So generally I think both China and the NBA acted reasonably — it’s China’s prerogative to determine what foreign actors can do in its country, and it’s the NBA’s business decision to manage relations with governments and viewers and players. China isn’t censoring our public square. If the NBA doesn’t want its members taking globally controversial stands, then fine. Iranian politicians and business people get sanctioned for expressing themselves on Israel and the US, so is the US distorting their freedom of speech? We should do nothing because everyone in the story is acting pretty reasonably and symmetrically according to their incentives and what is legal and culturally appropriate in the various regions concerned.
Would people find that reasonable because they think the US is generally pretty reasonable, or because they think any action of that sort is reasonable? I’d be surprised if anyone seriously held the latter view, and while the former is understandable, there are reasons to think the US and China are not analogous.
What if China is the reasonable one and the US is a dangerously bellicose and unstable empire that careens from Obamas to Trumps every few years?
Objection. That’s not an Empire, that’s the Roman Republic at the height of its international power.
Then we suspect that the reasonable one is committing lots of UN-defined human rights violations (e.g. breaching freedom of press, freedom of belief, the detention and abuse of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang)
EDIT: looking at the context of this particular comment thread, I think the parent comment is the wrong place for me to be making my point, because it sounds like I’m trying to say the US is totally reasonable and China is not. Instead, how about we condemn all human rights violations including those perpetrated by the US?
>pretending “UN Defined” isn’t the same as “Euro-US defined”
Shig dig
If we’re just trying to prove one country is worse than the other, the US has its own history of interning its citizens…
Those things are bad, but I think invading Iraq and Afghanistan were both arguably worse. Libya and Syria aren’t exactly great either.
The U.S. suddenly screws shit up half the world away, sometimes with little warning. At least if you don’t want the Chinese government to screw you, it’s relatively clear how you can get along. And it’s possible to exit. Not always easy, but possible. Getting away from U.S. influence is a lot tougher.
Ttar:
Can you point to anything the US is currently doing to its own people, or has done in the last 50 years, that looks like what China is doing to the Uighurs right now? Because I certainly can’t.
@Ttar
I’m not claiming that the US is without sin, but:
Setting aside who defined the term, are you disputing that e.g. breaching freedom of press, freedom of belief, the detention and abuse of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang are bad things?
A country that did something bad over 70 years ago might be a cause for mild concern, and scrutiny of the mechanisms that led to that action and of whether it’s possible or likely to happen again. However, a country actively doing something bad right now is a cause for far greater concern.
(also I have no idea what you mean by “Shig dig”)
Basically. I dispute that these things are necessarily unjustified (that they couldn’t be justified as serving a larger goal of social cohesion, stability, safety from terrorism, etc.).
Personally, I feel I and most others are better off in a world where China remains stable and doesn’t experience massive instability and lots of terrorism. China’s authoritarian policies lead to a worldstate I feel is preferable to so many other likely outcomes that it’s hard for me to say they should change. Do I want to live in China? No. But I don’t. I don’t mind if others disagree but I challenge the notion that we are worse off in America because China is restrictive of these rights, and that our culturally sacred rights have objective moral weight that all humans should have to respect and which all humans deserve. The concepts of “rights” and “freedom” are, like free will, illusions anyway.
@Ttar:
I don’t think that human rights necessarily have fundamental weight. I tend to Scott’s moral theory described here: higher-level theories of ethics/axiology should be consequentialist, but in a world where our moral reasoning evolved to justify whatever action we wanted to take, deontological rules like “don’t murder” and “don’t censor the press” are good strategies given our limited knowledge.
As for enforcing them on others…I understand that other cultures value freedom of speech/press/thought less than we do. I’ll even assume for sake of argument that China’s authoritarian policies result in greater stability and social cohesion. But I think that suppressing dissident ideas buys that short-term stability at the cost of stifling long-term intellectual progress. Freedom of thought is fundamental in that it allows society to correct its mistakes.
And when you have hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned in extra-legal camps…you don’t have to break out the 1984-esque hypotheticals to see the negative consequences of authoritarianism.
@Ttar:
What if evil things were actually good and good things were actually evil? This is the sort of thing that will convince no one who wasn’t already convinced.
I’m having difficulty imagining how instability in China could possibly have such deleterious effects on a person living in America to justify such a strong statement. It could be reasonably said to make us somewhat poorer, but I’m doubtful about how beneficial it is to have a major power capable of challenging U.S. dominance.
@Laukhi
I suspect we import enough from China that its destabilization could severely impact that trade and have pretty bad effects on our economy. Worst-case scenario, imagine not being able to import anything manufactured in China.
@thevoiceofthevoid:
If the USA was capable of enforcing its business interests during the height of the warlord era, it doesn’t seem too likely that there would be something that disastrous.
Edit: I mean to say, I could reasonably see “pretty bad effects on the economy”, but any event in which China is so destablilized that we could import close to nothing is an event in which China is weak enough that we could easily do something about it, I think.
Strongly disagree. At best you’d have half the country emphatically supporting and half emphatically condemning. Free Speech culture is (for now) still strong enough that active censorship isn’t gonna get cross-party support.
Really? I didn’t see many people emphatically supporting Maria Butina. You can argue it was different from a legal perspective, but from a de facto perspective, I’m not sure it was.
Individual acting as a foreign agent with support from [at least some people in] the Russian Government != foreign media (more accurately, a lone individual that is part of a foreign media) expressing support for a protest movement.
There is barely any resemblance here, basically a non-sequitur.
Why is the Russian government fundamentally different from the NBA? If Maria can’t come here and support gun rights (she seems to legitimately believe in guns rights) just because she gets support from a foreign government, why can members of the NBA expect to broadcast support for HK in China without their broadcasts being shut down? What’s the difference to China between their retaliation against the NBA because a member of the NBA used their position of notoriety to express something they didn’t provide prior approval to, and the US retaliation against the Russian government and its agents because those agents expressed their views in a way we didn’t provide prior approval to?
I never said, suggested, or implied that China can’t do that, for one (it certainly goes against my values, but China’s values are different from mine on this issue as I noted).
Other than that, if you don’t see a difference “agent acting on behalf of foreign government” from “private actor” where agent and actor can refer to individuals or businesses we’re probably too far apart to have a productive discussion on the topic.
**Edited to (I hope) remove overly negative tone
Wait, wait, wait. Do you legitimately believe Maria Butina’s purpose in coming to America was to promote gun rights?
If Maria Butina had come to the United States and gone on television saying “Vladimir Putin and I enthusiastically support gun rights in America and we think you should too!”, she would not be in jail today. And it wouldn’t matter if s/gun rights/Russia’s geopolitical agenda, or if she’d done it in RT’s New York studio.
Maria Butina is in prison, briefly, because she A: walked into a high-profile narrative that looked an awful lot like “Foreign femme fatale trades sexual favors for political ones, in the service of a nefarious foreign power!”, and B: when that turned out to be probably not true, was nonetheless privately engaged in lobbying activities that are legal within limits but which the law does require people to register before doing so that we can watch to make sure they stay within those limits.
And yes, from an absolute purist perspective, making lobbyists register would be an offense against the 1st amendment’s “petition the government for a redress of grievances” clause. But to assume that because we require foreign agents to register as lobbyists before engaging in lobbying, that we will also shut down foreign newspapers or TV stations if they e.g. show some gamer making anti-American references during a championship, is a rather large and unsupported leap.
This would depend entirely on if the protest movement was in the right or in the wrong.
Where left is right and right is wrong?
I don’t think it matters, honestly. Who gets to be the arbiter of whether the movement is right or wrong anyway?
Personally I don’t see much daylight between BLM and the HK protests. And thankfully as we saw a few years ago, the US population was easily able to discern and come to agreement on whether BLM was right or wrong. The only difference is that people who didn’t support BLM now are supporting HK because they don’t care about the damage the protests do to an Outgroup country and they are told by their own side’s media that China is the Big Bad.
I don’t know enough about the details of the HK protests to comment on specifics but this seems reasonable at face value.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. There was never agreement and still isn’t.
Regardless, I stand by the point that it just doesn’t matter whether the protest is “right” or “wrong”.
Sorry @ascymetric, I should have sarcasm tagged the second half of my comment. We are in agreement that protest movements like HK and BLM are not vulnerable to easy categorization as right or wrong.
Ha, sorry for missing the sarcasm. That comment reads much different with that in mind…we are certainly in agreement on that topic at least!
And if the US Government banned the Premier League from broadcasting here due to a UK manager expressing support for BLM, people would howl.
@Gobbobobble That’s a really good point, and I think it’s one @ascymetric was also making and maybe I was missing. I agree that people would oppose at high rates any attempt by the US to get an organization from a geopolitical ally to censor its members. But would people be upset if we censored an Iranian sports league, or a North Korean media company, for their members saying (even on their own time) “death to America?”
I’ll join @Nick and @Gobbobobble in dissenting pretty strongly here. I don’t think it would be surprising to see US politicians condemning that foreign media (and that would be fine), but actually censoring the media would not be reasonable and would see a substantial backlash.
We censored communist propaganda pretty hard during the Cold War, at least whenever we could prove it was being supported by an international actor. That had reasonably broad support. Why did Congress haul Zuck in, if not to pressure him to censor expression by the “Russian bots” etc.?
There is a difference (which I have also noted elsewhere) between “State action” and action of individuals or businesses (that are not state-run either de jure or de facto). Russian interference, and Cold War propaganda fall under the former. The NBA, Blizzard, and South Park issues fall under the latter.
I think this is obvious enough that it doesn’t need to be explicitly stated in every comment, so from this point on just assume that this distinction is important and that this conversation is focused on the private action side, not state action.
Can we discuss why that distinction is meaningful? Governments and companies are both just organizations of people responding to market pressures, right? I’m struggling to understand where/how distinguishing them cuts reality at the joints.
I said in another post in this thread that we were probably too far apart, but I’ll try to bite on this. I don’t feel prepared to have a full on philosophical conversation but here’s what I can offer for now at least.
The difference between a State and a Private Entity (person/business) lies in things like:
Authority/power: Yes, the USA and the NBA are both “organizations”, but the difference between the USA and the NBA is about as clear as the difference between the NBA and a high-school chess club.
Threat of force: The NBA has no military.
Those aren’t perfect or sufficient on their own and don’t hold up for edge cases (like nations with no military although I would argue that is a distinct type of entity from a State like the USA or China) or private companies with “security forces” seen on some parts of the world, but are two important and relevant components that come to mind.
I’m not familiar with these sanctions. What are some examples?
If Iran”s leadership were pro-US and pro-Israel, do you think Trump would have unilaterally backed out of the nuclear deal and put sanctions on them?
“If the NBA doesn’t want its members taking globally controversial stands, then fine.”
It depends on to what extent you think workers’ speech outside the workplace should be under management’s control. The libertarians see the situation as “freedom,” I think most people have a different definition of what “freedom” means.(And if you’re gonna ask what Trump or the Republican Party are going to do about it, the answer is nothing and that’s one reason why I left the party and stopped supporting Trump.)
I’d also like to point out that this is an area with an especially severe need for regulation because the NBA is a monopsony from the point of view of the players, who can’t just switch to football mid-career.
A good point, but then shouldn’t Tim Cook be protected if he posts “homosexuality is a sin and its practitioners will go to hell” (as a ridiculous toy example) on Twitter, during his non working hours and using his personal account? Do you think the board should be able to fire him?
He’s already protected (at least in theory) by religious discrimination laws.
The situation is complicated when a worker’s job includes being a public spokesperson for their employer under their own name. I think whoever runs the @NBA twitter account (assuming it’s a random employee whose name I’ve never heard) should be able to freely express their political views on their personal account, where it’s clear the opinions are their own. For someone like Tim Cook or Daryl Morey, whose name is publicly associated with their company, their twitter feed tends to be a blurry mix of personal statements and statements on behalf of their employer. I’m not sure to what extent they should be allowed to state their personal opinions in that space.
What people are objecting to, IMO, is that China is exporting its authoritarianism. So, if China wanted to control what NBA players/managers said in China, people might react differently. But neither the NBA incident nor the Hearthstone incident actually took place in China, nor did it involve Chinese people. It’s a lot easier to live and let live with regard to government systems, if China would stay in its lane.
People really don’t like the idea of American companies imposing consequences on Americans for statements critical of Chinese policy.
The Hearthstone incident did involve a Hong Kong citizen (the player) unless I have misunderstood.
Yes. Blitz (the player) is from Hong Kong.
China banned NBA broadcasts in China. They didn’t ban it anywhere else. Don’t they have the right to determine what foreign organizations broadcast in their country?
Yes, I don’t care about what they do in their country.
I care if American companies are willing to compromise their values to not run afoul of Chinese state interests.
If the situation were reversed, and a foreign power’s international media began supporting a seriously disruptive protest movement in our country, and the US government said “no intervening” and banned that foreign company from expressing its views on our soil, I think most people would find that reasonable.
I wouldn’t, I’d find it abhorrent. The Russiagate nonsense is bad enough but outright bans on foreign media (let alone foreign private citizens) are a whole new level of authoritarian. I don’t think this kind of nationalism where no foreigners are supposed to express political opinions on another country’s politics is compatible with democracy, especially in the internet age.
I would expect a lot of people to protest an action like that from the USG.
I think an action like that by the federal government would not need to go to the Supreme court, as it would be stopped in the first federal court it was appealed to.
The US is, at the moment, the country that takes freedom of speech most seriously.
Add me to the chorus of people saying this is absolutely wrong. I mean, it isn’t even a hypothetical. Al Jazeera is basically a subsidiary of the Qatari government, its coverage of e.g. the Occupy Wall Street protests has been quite supportive even unto describing the response to same as a “brutal crackdown by state authorities”, and there was never any serious proposal to block them from broadcasting to or in the United States. Sure, the far right would be on board with blatant censorship, on “If scary Muslims do it, we’re against it” grounds, but so what? More generally, given any domestic protest on the leftright, the Far RightLeft will be in favor of censoring anyone, foreign or domestic, who speaks out in favor of the protesters. And the remaining 90+% of the population will fall back on a popular mythology of Free Speech that has deep fuzzy borders around the Bailey but a solidly defensible Motte of “we have to let anybody who is plausibly a reporter say whatever they want about politics”.
I’m not even sure you are imagining “banning that foreign company from expressing its views on our soil” would even work. How is that supposed to be implemented, in your imagination? We don’t have a censors’ office with the power to ban speech by government demand, we don’t have any law enforcement agencies or government bureaucracies whose mandate normally includes e.g. pulling the plug on printing presses. There’s nobody who could be tasked with implementing such a ban that wouldn’t respond with “That’s really weird and way outside what we normally do; I’m not going to risk getting in trouble over this until I get the OK from Legal”. Which kicks it up to the courts, where it would die slowly.
If anyone were to actually try that, it would fail harder than even Trump’s “Muslim ban”, and Trump did have access to a bureaucracy whose normal mandate includes blocking unwanted people from entering the united states.
It’s reasonable for a parent to tell another adult to “butt out” when the parent is disciplining her child and the adult is trying to intervene. However, it is unreasonable for the parent to discipline her child by, say, hitting her with a hammer.
Hitting a kid with a hammer is frowned upon by the authorities. In international relations, there are no authorities, so speaking up if you think hammer blows are imminent is entirely right and proper. Also, in this particular case the parent has only recently obtained custody, and their past treatment of their other children is extremely concerning.
I agree with you on the object level. However, on the meta level:
Hitting a kid with a hammer is frowned upon by nearly everyone. (Obviously not that parent, but almost certainly that kid.) Meanwhile, nearly everyone also frowns upon meddling with others’ families by default. This matters here insofar as people seem to be criticizing China for telling the US to butt out. Telling us to butt out isn’t what we think China is doing wrong; rather, it’s cracking down on Hong Kong protestors.
There exists a custom among some Americans of not using authority to determine what’s reasonable, but rather to use widely shared principles. When those principles aren’t universal, conflict can of course arise. In this case, everyone respects sovereignty, and only some also respect nonviolent protest.
@Paul Brinkley
While pretty much everyone agrees with the concept of sovereignty in general, there’s some disagreement regarding who exactly should be sovereign over whom.
Well, do you think China should be sovereign over Hong Kong? Is your thinking the same if we’re in a timeline where there was no protest?
@Paul Brinkley
In a timeline with no protest, I wouldn’t even be thinking about it and thus wouldn’t have much opinion either way. Even as it stands, I don’t think I have enough information on the protester’s particular demands and the populace’s opinion on them to make a sensible judgement in this case. (I do however lean in support of the Honk Kong protesters due to my distaste for China’s authoritarianism.)
But my core point is that there is a large number of people with each of the following contradictory opinions:
1. China should have sovereignty over its territory of Hong Kong.
2. Hong Kong should have sovereignty as an independent nation.
Your purported principle of “respecting sovereignty” doesn’t help us in this dilemma. And to the extent that you use it to mean “the government that has historically controlled an area should continue to control it, human rights violations be damned”, it’s far less universally agreed-upon.
Hong Kong was promised a degree of autonomy in the treaty which ceded ultimate sovereignty to China, and China is reneging.
Plenty of foreign politicians “express themselves” on Israel and the US without any sanctions. Just a few days ago the PM of Malaysia (according to whom “hook-nosed Jews rule the world by proxy”) was an invited speaker at the Columbia University. The difference between Iranian and Malaysian governments is that the former is actively involved in killing civilians across the globe.
That’s basically the role of RT, and the US hasn’t banned that organization, other than (last time I checked) press passes for eg. White House reporting.
I will start by saying I like playing devil’s advocate – pro-West to Chinese people and pro-China to Western audiences.
First, there’s a fundamental difference in values. Self-determination and free speech are not universal values. There are those who prioritize safety and stability as the foundation for pursuing prosperity over individual “freedoms”.
So when the spoils of the Opium wars is finally returned in 1997, and some twenty odd years later experiences economic unrest due to youth being priced out by mainlanders etc., it may well be that China treats this as a domestic affair and would rather not have foreign powers (again) butt in, nor foreign corporations endorse pro-protester causes.
And so China, being autocratic as it is, is fully within their rights to utilize its censors and discourage those who wish to do business with it from fomenting revolt.
The functional constituency system (which Beijing preserves, and which the protestors want abolished) isn’t just incompatible with democracy, it’s incompatible with communism, which is supposedly a Chinese value. The CPC needs to change it’s name and drop “people’s” from the name of the state if they’re going to be propping up a quite literal form of bourgeois rule.
They’ve long ago recast their system as socialism with Chinese characteristics!
De jure and de facto differ here. Now just as before, the social contract is defer to authorities in exchange for safety and stability
If safety and stabiity were really fundamental “Chinese values”, then who’s doing the protesting? I’ve always felt that cultural relativism was a strange thing to assert. Maybe we can say that HKers are actually not Chinese, but it’s not like China doesn’t have a long history of revolts and rebellion.
Also, your argument seems to suggest that the NBA is wrong in engaging in self-censorship – hardly the most accordant with “American values”. Would you disagree?
I’m only answering the first question, on whether what China did was defensible – which was to say in light of the GM’s tweet, they will end the Rockets partnership and not broadcast their games.
And I think it’s fine for them to tow a hard line when it comes to outsiders butting into internal affairs. The narrative there is that restless ungrateful youth are using any excuse to try to declare independence, in what was initially a guise of withdrawing the extradition bill, which was finally done.
If Jack Ma advocated for a part of the US to have an authoritarian government form, would it be ok for media to not give him a platform and the government to scrutinize deals with Alibaba?
Unless you think HK being a full democracy is a realistic goal given the integration timeline, an authoritarian government will do as authoritarians do and limit business of outsiders supporting dissent.
It is perhaps permissible, if a neighbor comes to your door and asks you to stop making that infernal racket, to tell them to get off of your property and slam the door in their face. But it sure ain’t right.
I don’t believe that the PRC should be doing what it’s doing, and so I certainly don’t mind people informing them of that.
It’s perfectly reasonable for the US to be suspicious of companies from the PRC for reasons other than political advocacy. Aside from that, I don’t think either the US or the media should treat Ma differently (in regards to meta-level principles) than they do, say, Moldbug.
It’s true that I’d like for China to be united under a liberal democracy, but I’m certainly capable of recognizing reality. Still, I’m not certain what this has to do with what’s right for the PRC to do.
Let’s go ahead and port over the whole conversation from the last open thread since there are multiple events related to China and free speech/international business recently. Aftagley’s post nicely summarized the recent issues.
I’m not sure the question of whether China’s actions are defensible. Under our societal norms/rules/concept of rights? No. Under theirs? Yes. It is pretty much as simple as that.
The NBA’s initial response (against the GM) was indefensible (or at least wrong, there are plausible defenses that can be offered but I think they all fall flat). Their later waffling/fence sitting stance was tolerable, but fails to satisfy due to the initial reaction (if they had used their current position as their starting position it would have come off better). The NBA has based a large part of its brand on allowing players/coaches/etc. to voice their opinions openly and supported them when they do. The walk back here was pretty weak. If a US based business wants to base their policies for US based employees on rules or expectations of foreign governments I suppose that is their right, but they should be prepared for blowback domestically (and in other International markets that share our values) when they do so, and if they aren’t careful they may wind up falling afoul of US laws.
The same pretty much applies to Blizzard, except that since the people involved do not to be based in the US things are a little different (but they still expose themselves to backlash in the US).
Ultimately this is a bit of a coordination issue I think. US companies ought to just stand up to China and say “we will comply with your laws and policies within your borders, but will not hold our non-China based employees or business practices to your restrictive/draconian standards”.
So, are we holding China accountable to our own standard and conception of free speech right? Would you accept China holding us accountable to their own standards and conceptions?
EtA: to clarify I guess I don’t see why if companies can fire people for supporting Nazis on social media why they can’t fire people or censor them or whatever for supporting some other thing that the company finds unacceptable to support. Sure, markets will react but they react to everything, and honestly I doubt the NBA or Blizzard will lose much money over their policy of appeasing China. Hollywood sure isn’t.
Reread my post. The very first line (after the block quote) says that China’s actions are defensible under their standards. I don’t take issue with China applying their own standards (except in the sense that I take issue with their standards at the top level, but granting that they have those standards I don’t take issue with their authority to apply them on their soil). I take issue with US companies applying Chinese standards on speech to US employees, especially when it becomes a trend, and prefer that they not do that.
That’s…how standards work? It’s my understanding that Western films/media are frequently censored/blocked from entering Chinese markets in the first place. I don’t think Chinese theaters should be opened to our films at gunpoint, but I can certainly criticize their decision to ban or censor in the first place.
The NBA is competing with HBO and Netflix and this blog for my attention. Their actions impact my willingness to watch their show. Sure, Morey’s tweet Zugzwang’d the NBA, but how they reacted was still how they reacted.
I’m sort of in agreement. My main concern is a country using access to its markets to force international companies to shut out non-nationals from it’s serviecs for failing to engage in the same self-censorship that would be expected of a chinese national.
This is more or less my concern, or at least in the same general vicinity.
I’m sure inevitably comparisons are going to be made with Facebook/Twitter/cancel-culture stuff while we have this discussion, but I think the fact that this is coming from a foreign state and not “the public” makes it a distinct and (IMO) more concerning problem.
We can argue among ourselves about what people should and shouldn’t be able to say and what social repercussions are/aren’t acceptable, but I’ll be damned if the Chinese government gets a say.
I hope a lesson is learned here that we should be careful ever setting a norm of firing people for momentary outrages, which as several folks have already pointed out is part of what got us in this mess. Unfortunately, I think it’s likelier we just get more of both in the future—more woke firings and more China-appeasing firings.
Yeah. I guess where I land is that the whole “firing over having/expressing the wrong views thing” is fraught and difficult. I don’t have easy answers or anything that could be described as a consistent and solid position.
China-appeasing seems much more clear-cut than “US citizen outrage appeasing”.
I sort of disagree.
if a company decides that they have standards and one of their employees acts in such a way (or posts in such a way) that violates their standards, I’m a little bit supportive of them to terminate that employee. (My support for those companies decreases when it becomes clear that they only terminate that employee in response to a twitter hate mob, however)
The thing is, you can’t support an ethical position to one part of your consumer base and opposite positions when you don’t think the public is watching. That’s where these companies lose me.
Americans pushing back against not just legal but also moral free speech norms are a disease of the heart; the Chinese government trying to apply leverage to corporations is a disease of the skin.
Skin cancer can kill you far more quickly than a heart defect.
A more typical skin disease is roundworm. Irritating but not only survivable but usually goes away on its own.
Most heart diseases are pretty bad though!
Note about above post. I am stupid. Mind switched “ringworm” with “roundworm”.
Roundworm not even a skin infection and is actually pretty nasty intestine infection. While ringworm is a skin infection but not actually a worm.
Should be:
The Chinese government applying leverage over US citizens by pressuring their US employers.
Which is a little bit different.
More layers makes the effect weaker and less relevant not more. They have to rely on the behavior of an intermediary they don’t control having an effect on employees speech in their favor, when employees can get another job or choose not to work there.
@Aftagley
I’m not against that in principle. When I said momentary outrages, the twitter hate mobs were what I had in mind.
@Machine Interface
Skin cancer is one of the least lethal cancers (in part because it tends to be obvious when you have a growing tumor in your skin).
“Ultimately this is a bit of a coordination issue I think. US companies ought to just stand up to China and say “we will comply with your laws and policies within your borders, but will not hold our non-China based employees or business practices to your restrictive/draconian standards”.”
That won’t happen unless the government steps in and forces them to do so, the way it forced companies to stop boycotting Israel to appease the Arabs.*
*Notice almost none of the “free-market” Republicans see any problem with that particular infringement on the rights of private companies. What’s that tell you?
I largely agree with this stance. If we take the amoral view that sovereignty stands first and that each country is free to establish the speech norms it wishes within its territory, then China has as much an obligation to respect US speech norms in the US than the US have an obligation to respect Chinese speech norms in China.
China telling foreign companies what their US-based employees can and cannot say is not acceptable and both US companies should take a strong stance against this. If China won’t accept that, then its claim to freedom from foreign interference is void.
That’s not an amoral view, that’s just a bizarro-deontology. “Sovereignty stands first” is something that needs to be argued for; it’s not any more amoral than any other normative statement.
It’s a pragmatic view: if everyone respects sovereignty we have less wars, and so less of all the bad things associated with wars, and so everyone is a little bit better off.
My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.
This is still very much a moral rather than a purely factual claim.
Pain is not a moral construct, and “this action reduces pain, and therefore should be pursued if reducing pain is the goal” is a factual claim that requires no moral theory behind it.
Helping totalitarian powers suppress internal dissent seems a funny way of avoiding wars, but maybe that’s just me.
Wait, who’s helping who?
My point is, respecting China’s sovereignty to edict the speech norms they want in their country has to have a reciprocal. China telling Chinese companies what their employees in China are allowed to say in public about China is China’s problem. China telling western companies what their employees in the west are allowed to say about China is a casus belli.
@Machine Interface:
I’m a little unclear on what you’re trying to say, so if I misinterpret you please feel free to correct me!
If you are going to make claims like “…and so everyone is a little bit better off”, then you cannot assert that you are making purely factual statements.
Once again, this is a moral claim of the sort made by deontologists, and furthermore it places special privileges on state actors besides. Why should there be any reciprocal? Why shouldn’t we freely run roughshod over the PRC’s “speech norms” while enforcing whatever we like?
Basically my issue is:
1. If you are saying that something the PRC has done is a casus belli, then you really can’t make a utilitarian argument about respecting sovereignty since you’ve already agreed that the US would be justified in declaring war. Additionally, US hegemony is long-run better than PRC hegemony.
2. If you are making a deontologist argument, I think it is very strange to assume both that state actors are themselves individual moral actors (rather than being institutions comprised of moral actors) and even more so that they are automatically legitimate.
3. I cannot see any way in which your arguments are purely factual or amoral.
The respect of sovereignty means less war, less war means less global suffering. Less suffering is something any mentally healthy person desires. Acting out that desire thus involves (among other things) preserving and enforcing sovereignty. Enforcing sovereignty implies reacting firmly, up to and including with violence, when sovereignty is breached. It’s not moral, it’s not even utilitarian, it’s just a causal chain.
I haven’t been following the thread, but this statement struck me. It might be casus belli if they enforced their orders by assassinating employees in the west who disobeyed. But telling companies that if they let their employees say things the Chinese government doesn’t like the Chinese government will not allow those companies to do business in China is well within normal rules of sovereignty.
Forget “freedom” in the abstract sense; China has freedom from most significant foreign interference because it has the power to make any other kinds of interference absolutely disastrous for both parties. Businesses will ultimately continue to do business with China because it has gigantic economic power that cannot be resisted, and the US government will continue to do nothing more than complain because China has gigantic military power. A smaller but still significantly dangerous power, Russia, can get away with assassinating dissidents on the soil of Western countries, so absolutely nothing will happen to China other than the phrase “strained relations between the two countries” appearing in several Wikipedia articles.
Power is the only real freedom.
Obviously
This is really a good question, and I don’t have a good answer on this. This is likely going to be a low-level tit-for-tat. For instance, we pretty much always have legal authority to put sanctions on some Chinese company or person somewhere: see the Uighur crisis. I’m sure, if we really wanted to, we could find a few more companies tangentially related to the enterprise that we could sanction.
But is that really going to be effective enough? Honestly, I don’t think so. You hit diminishing returns pretty quickly, meanwhile Corporate America can be much, MUCH more effective in policing its employee’s speech than it currently is.
Which is why we as consumers have a moral duty (if we find these company’s actions reprehensible) to firmly vote with our wallet.
If you look at the companies that are behaving like this, they are all ones that have effectively established a monopoly in the US (NBA) or are operating from a position of absolute dominance (Blizzard). They clearly feel like their position in the US is so secure that they can afford to compromise on American values abroad and face no significant financial repercussions here.
I think we should prove them wrong.
That sounds like collective action hell. I don’t know how bad it gets before we get a sufficient mass of people to boycott Blizzard or the NBA.
This is why some saber rattling directed at China (to stop policing actions of American citizens or else) or at American businesses (to not try to enforce foreign policies on US soil or else) is useful (as I think you’re alluding to a couple comments down).
I don’t think I actually want the government to regulate US businesses in that way (for a lot of reasons, including that it would be implemented and enforced terribly), but I don’t mind the threat of it to encourage American companies to change behavior to avoid said terrible regulation being proposed.
Why punish random Chinese companies for the behavior of the Chinese government and our companies?
We do not want China using its political weight to police speech on US soil. US government actions can disincentive China from doing so.
Note: I am using the term “China” and not “Chinese citizens” or “Chinese government” or “Chinese sailors” or any other specific category. We do not want any foreign actor attempting to police speech on US soil, and the US government is sufficiently powerful to inflict consequences on any foreign actor that does so. We should do so within the bounds of reason and our international agreements.
I question whether your grouping of all those categories into a single entity accurately reflects the way that they will react to the sanctions we’re discussing.
Possibly the Chinese government would interpret a sanction on a random Chinese company as deserved retaliation for their actions that hurts the Chinese economy, and stop trying to police US speech. Or possibly, they would regard it as a strange attack on an unrelated party and not react at all. Your suggestion may or may not be a valid plan, but you can’t explain it just by pretending an entire country’s government, citizens, and companies are the same thing.
I don’t think “how would China be able to tell if sanctions were in retaliation to this issue?” is a reasonable argument against. They would know, whether we openly announced it or made it clear through less public channels.
Sure, but the first step here is an anti-boycott law similar to our laws against companies boycotting Israel. If China wants to then retaliate against the NBA despite knowing its hands are tied, that would be the time to retaliate. For now it makes no sense to complain about the action of an American company and then punish Chinese companies.
The American companies are taken actions under pressure by the Chinese government. Sanctions on Chinese companies to counter-pressure the Chinese government is basically de rigueur.
I think the point of this kind of policy is that the company can then say to China “Hey, guys, sorry, we’d really love to impose those restrictions on our employees’ speech, but that’s against US law and those mean ole guys at the FTC will bust us for it if we try.”
I think it’s likely defensible on sovereignty grounds. If the Chinese government is the legitimate ruler of Hong Kong, then the best the Hong Kong protesters can hope for is to delay full integration with the mainland as much as possible until the agreed upon date.
Reports I’ve read seem to indicate that mainland Chinese sentiment aligns well with the government, so it’s not like you can just blame the Chinese government for its stance either.
I don’t think I care about the NBA response either way.
America is unlikely to do much about it besides complain because real action would have serious costs. It’s also unlikely that our public square can be distorted enough that we should care. American citizens’ individual speech rights are probably under less danger from this than they are from internal challenges. It’s best to accept this and move on.
If one really wants to do something, then one needs to make an effort to minimize consumption of things made by Chinese companies. Which would hurt. Or stop consuming stuff from companies complicit in toeing the Chinese party line. Which will also hurt.
Personally, I’m not going to do anything like the first thing because it would hurt, and because it seems like it’s a bit late now to move away from the path of greater economic engagement. My hope is that U.S. ideals corrupt China more than Chinese ideals corrupt the U.S.
At the margins, I might not use a product from a U.S. corporation that seems to be licking boots too much, but it’s a very low priority for me. Product price and quality is usually going to be way more important.
Well, no. The best they can hope for is whatever they can hope for. They can hope that they get independence, they can hope their special status is preserved, they can hope for anything they want.
Maybe, but the media is state controlled and public discourse is tightly censored. If you control what people learn and what they can say, you don’t get the benefit of banking of public support.
Doing the right thing sometimes does.
I mean realistic hopes obviously. Use context.
True that the media is state controlled, but I don’t think it matters in this case. I think this post pretty much sums it up.
American media is relatively uncensored, and yet a large number of the most politically engaged Americans believe that a few Russian facebook ads had a deep affect on the 2016 elections. Congress dragged Mark Zuckerberg before it under this and other stupid pretenses. Other Americans previously spent about a decade convinced Obama was a secret Muslim Kenyan. The Chinese government doesn’t need much propaganda or censorship machinery in this case.
Right in what sense? Trade helped lift about a billion Chinese to a much higher standard of living. There are very real tradeoffs involved, and it’s not at all obvious that suddenly swinging towards isolationism would actually be the right thing to do.
It need not be isolationist. We could buy all our cheap garbage from India instead. The difference is they aren’t an autocratic dystopia.
Sure, but under standard arguments of the benefits of specialization and trade, cutting off 1/6 of the earth’s population from trading with us will make both us and them poorer. Or maybe some other country will serve a middleman skimming profits in disguised China-U.S. trade.
And no one has outlined why I should expect this to result in China becoming any freer. Maybe their reaction will to become less free and more oppressive. Like North Korea.
Also, we trade with China in things like manufacturing parts of computers. How well is India going to be able to replace that?
Frankly, when the alternative is CCP leveraging Western corporate
greedincentives to erode our civil liberties, I do not care. Let us be poorer. We can take our money to developing nations that don’t mandate we build altars to Moloch-with-Chinese-characteristics, and lift their standard of living.+1
Globalism doesn’t mean Chinaism; there would be a cost to backing up our ideals with economic action but it’s not an insurmountable one.
What Gobbobobble and Aftagley said. And Beijing doesn’t care that it makes the Chinese people poorer, so long as it makes Beijing more powerful. And they know that you care so very, very much about being made even a tiny bit poorer, that you’ll let them amass absolute power one step at a time so long as they hand you some cheap trinkets at every step. That they are, for the moment, wielding that power against people far away, doesn’t make this a good deal.
+1 to Gobbobobble et al.
I’d have an easier time taking the talk about “it’s no big deal to stop trading with China; they just make trinkets” seriously if I saw people throwing their smartphones in the trash.
Little new information on the ideas and behavior of the CPC has been revealed in the last few months.
I want to be clear whether you all are arguing it was always morally wrong to trade with China, or if somehow the last few months have changed the balance before we continue.
Also, this is nonsense. What the CPC did was what they’ve done in China for several decades except they used to be much worse back in the 50s and 60s. What they did to the U.S. was pull some NBA broadcasts, and say they were mad.
This doesn’t scream a goal of “absolute power”. That’s ridiculous. There are no signs they have goals beyond regional hegemony and “more stuff for us”.
Right, but crucially – I don’t really care about what their goals are. I care about US company’s selling out US values outside of China in order to not offend the Chinese government.
If China’s system inevitably results in their values being forced globally, that’s where I draw the line, that’s when I have a problem.
@Aftagley
+1
I highly doubt pulling NBA broadcasts will result in their values inevitably being forced globally. Hong Kong itself is part of China, so ramping up censorship and control there is little different than what the CPC has been doing on the mainland since it took over. Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 with an expiration date of 2047 for “two systems”. China is over 100x as big as Hong Kong in population and area, so we could’ve guessed which system was likely to be on top at the end of that.
I repeat my earlier question
Because we’re just going round and round the fundamental issue. Was the economic engagement of the past few decades a mistake? I think probably not, but I could be convinced that it was. It would have been a lot easier if the mistake hadn’t been made, but the U.S. is still ahead of China militarily. U.S. allies in the region are adjacent to China in the East, and the U.S. could apply pressure on Europe to stop trading with China as well.
Or have the last few months changed the balance of what is the correct course? I have difficulty coming up with an argument for this considering the CPC mass censorship of the mainland, the repression of Christianity, the persecution the Falun Gong, Chinese control of Tibet, times before that China has leaned on U.S. companies to not categorize Taiwan as a separate country, etc. This has been common knowledge for a while, and I don’t see how current CPC behavior doesn’t fit the pattern of past CPC behavior like a glove.
Or maybe it’s just important to ding Chinese prestige in return to prove that the U.S. is paying attention and irritated, but not important enough to cut off trade. This strikes me as a somewhat cynical calculation, but not wrong.
Wait a second, that’s literally almost exactly what happened! Up until the NBA faced significant backlash in the USA, they were on track to fire the GM who made that statement. That is 100% an example of China attempting to force their values, and the pulling of broadcasts is the Chinese Government’s way of punishing the NBA for not enforcing the values.
You’re getting your causality mixed here; the broadcasts being pulled are the punishment for violating the plan, not a part of the plan.
*checks calendar* ok, I’ll check back in 27 and 1/2 years when this point becomes relevant.
In retrospect, probably yes. Increasingly so as it became obvious they weren’t willing to play ball on a level field. Maybe at the beginning when we thought it could lead to improvements in their system it was justifiable, but when it became clear we were a: being taken advantage of and b: helping to prop up the autocratic regime, yes it was unethical. I can’t tell you exactly when the switch flipped.
Because it’s starting to cross over their borders and affect us here at home, and not in a “hmm, something feels off about the global economy way” but in a “hey, my favorite hearthstone player just got kicked off the air because Activision/Blizzard is afraid of getting kicked out of their next developing market.”
I’ll at least partially bite this bullet. I would dispute “always” – it made sense to open up trade relations when it was believed that engaging in free(r) trade would have the knockon effect of liberalizing China in other ways. We’ve been slowly realizing that this did not happen. The CCP is just too powerful. I can’t point to an inflection date but at some point along the way trading with China morphed from plausibly being an anti-totalitarian influence to one that further entrenches state control.
Probably somewhere around when everyone realized China was a proper geopolitical rival and not a poor dictatorship in need of uplifting? Maybe
WinnieXi’s reign in particular?I think the past few months have just been some comparatively sharp examples that catalyze the realization that the frog’s water has been heating up.
@Aftagley
They almost managed the minor gain of showing they could get a rich guy fired on a single value. Not all their values. Not globally. Just in the NBA. They’ve succeeded at that before with the Marriott employee who got fired for liking a pro-Tibet tweet. Yet there was no collapse of U.S. values then towards Chinese values. Why should I be more worried because the NBA almost fired someone higher on the totem pole than Marriott did?
China has banned Western companies from entering China before, and now another one of them had a choice and almost wimped out before the backlash doesn’t seem very dangerous to me. Companies have fully wimped out before and apologized, and few were worried. I think the not very worried were right.
The point is relevant now, because unless you want to argue it is or was clear the CPC would fall and be replaced by a democracy by 2047, then the smart bet would’ve been Hong Kong looks a lot more like the mainland not the mainland looks a lot more like Hong Kong. But now maybe we only will need to wait 5 or 10 years before the outcome becomes clearer.
The CPC falling on its own wouldn’t be enough. The Soviet Union fell and was largely replaced by more autocrats. And Hong Kong is a lot tinier and closer in culture and ties to China than those Soviet states were to Russia.
Yeah, no one knows for certain, but it would take a lot of optimism or ignorance to bet on the dominant player in that game being the mainland.
@ Aftagley @Gobbobobble
I agree it’s likely that some reevaluation about what exactly has been and should be traded is necessary. But how sure are you the liberalization plan failed? North Korea and Cuba have been cut off by the U.S. for a very long time. What do you think lack of engagement was more likely to do, make China be more like the U.S. or make it be more like North Korea or the China of 1960?
I’d rather we up’d the war of ideas so to speak before giving up on the engagement idea. Especially by corrupting the youth. Foreign students come to the U.S. for college? Welcome to your mandatory Civics and Western Civilization classes. May as well make it mandatory for Americans too; it can’t hurt much.
Ideally, the best case scenario is U.S. citizens gets China to ban our media and maybe other random nice things from their country without making any obvious centrally coordinated effort. This will make us look better from the perspective of Chinese citizens who are only on board with the CPC as much as it can deliver nice stuff.
I admit it would likely help for U.S. consumers to harshly react towards U.S. companies that kowtow too much. I don’t care about the NBA, but a lot of people obviously do, so if they want to force the NBA to not punish its employees for what they say by threatening to boycott it if it doesn’t show that’s no skin off my back. That forces the ball into the Chinese court to ban stuff their own citizens like and they previously gave them access too.
But it would have been pretty hypocritical of me to be like “Boycott any entertainment corporations who cave” since I consume so little of that. I wasn’t gonna throw my computer or shoes in the trash or confirm they were sourced from everywhere but China. Maybe when I replace them a year or two down the road the choice will have been made for me, or I can reconsider out of the heat of the moment. But at the moment, I’m not nearly as bothered as most people seem to be.
I’m not imaging this engagement and an upscaled propaganda war leads to a full fledged Chinese democracy any time soon. But it may lead to something like significantly less authoritarian one party rule or in the long run pseudo one-party rule. If we’re really lucky, Chinese politics look more like a much larger Singapore after 100 years.
“America is unlikely to do much about it besides complain because real action would have serious costs.
If one really wants to do something, then one needs to make an effort to minimize consumption of things made by Chinese companies. Which would hurt.”
America’s government could easily force American companies not to comply with Chinese “recommendations” to boycott companies or discipline employees. Look at the Israeli anti-boycott laws. There’s no need to punish China, I can’t really blame it for taking advantage of our weakness.
In theory if the American government operated as a unified front, I agree they’d have the power.
But I think your last sentence pretty much sums it up. In practice, the American government is not going to risk economic damage to America for the sake of maybe causing some changes halfway across the world.
EDIT: I don’t think that’s strictly a weakness though. It’s also a strength but in a more subtle way.
EDIT EDIT: Except for the American government’s famous penchant to spend vast amounts (thus causing less obvious but incredibly large economic costs) by invading other countries for poor reasons. But the point is that forcing companies to deal with the U.S. or China would be a pretty obvious cost, so it’s less likely.
Yes, the NBA is hypocritical. Very much so, and usually its hypocrisy runs down the fault line of cultural Right-Left in the U.S., which is not surprising given the demographics of its players and primary set of domestic consumers.
That being established, one thing I’m not seeing discussed is what price the Chinese government pays for this type of stance. On the one hand, obviously they can just snap their fingers and presto, NBA preseason games are off Chinese TV, and in so doing affect what NBA players/personnel say in the U.S. On the other hand, the reason China is a huge market for NBA basketball is that Chinese people really like NBA basketball. At some point, if the CCP pushed this to the brink, their “ammunition” involves cutting off their own people from a product they want very much. The CCP becomes marginally more the “won’t let you watch basketball” party for Chinese who want that. Yes, in the short term speech on Hong Kong protests gets censored. But if it’s a lot of younger people in HK doing the protesting, and if it’s a lot of younger people in the PRC who like basketball, in the long term perhaps the CCP nudges a younger generation towards more sympathy and respect for the protesters.
I’m not saying it works out necessarily in this case, or in any near future case. U.S. folks should feel free to counter-boycott the NBA if they kowtow to the Commies. But it’s not entirely cost-free for China to attempt this kind of maneuver, and I’m not sure doing so is even in their own long-term interest (then again, in the long run we’re all dead).
I actually suspect this too even though I think the American response will most likely be sound and fury signifying nothing. I don’t think the CPC gains much from pulling basketball broadcasts. The CPC already blocked Twitter with their firewall anyways.
The CPC needs to remember Americans are likely to get bored if you just wait for things to blow over. American public opinion would have to be incredibly negative to materially hurt them. If the CPC were wise, they would just totally ignore it. If the CPC keeps poking like this, they’ll risk keeping themselves in American minds too much.
I see some parallels with the Muhammad cartoon issue that was all the rage last decade: in a globalized world, which takes priority: the norms of the society where speech takes place or those of the society most closely associated with the subject matter of the speech/expression? Going back further, I’m reminded of the Cold War joke that the Soviet Union had as much protection of free speech as the USA since no one would arrest you for saying “President Reagan is an idiot” in Red Square.
I do see the similarities, but will note a difference between “offending” a specific foreign state with political speech and offending a religion (practiced worldwide) with “speech” considered offensive by that religion. I probably still would have preferred the episode not be censored, but am much more understanding of the decision to do so in that case.
If there’s a strong norm against punishing employees for off-the-clock political activity, then I think it’s relatively easy for US companies to refuse Chinese (Russian, Saudi, German, Israeli, etc.) demands to punish some off-the-clock political activity by firing the person who engages in it. You can say “we just don’t do that, we never have, it would be a PR disaster and probably get us sued, no way.”
But once you’ve established the norm that corporations punish employees for off-the-clock political activity all the time, based on who is offended (the management of the corporation, its high-value employees, its advertisers, its customers, its shareholders, its regulators, etc.), then it’s very hard to refuse Chinese (Russian, Saudi, etc.) demands to punish offensive off-the-clock political activity. When China says “Fire this guy who tweeted some offensive stuff about Chinese politics,” and you just got done firing someone else last week for tweeting some offensive stuff supporting Trump and attacking AOC, and firing someone a couple months ago for online posts claiming that transwomen were just men with a weird sexual fetish, and firing someone a year ago for having an insufficiently feminist type of BDSM relationship going on, it’s just going to be really hard to argue “no, we don’t do that sort of thing.” You’ve already declared yourself to be a prostitute, and now we’re dickering over the price.
This is why free-speech norms are important, and that XKCD comic is terribly wrongheaded.
+1
I think it would be acceptable if China used propaganda and resulting unpopularity among Chinese consumers to do it. The fact that they went a step beyond that and used hard power (e.g. cancelling broadcasts on state tv) is illegitimate. I draw the line in terms of something akin to, if not exactly, free trade. I don’t expect China to act like a western democracy but it’s when they don’t act like a reasonable trading partner that I think it’s reasonable for the anarchic international system to draw a line (using the state for commercial espionage is another example.)
So, there have been several letters sent to the NBA/Adam Silver by members of congress, including a joint letter from 8 representatives signed by, among others, Ted Cruz and AOC.
They’re basically encouraging the NBA to more strongly support the free speech of their employees and also encourage them to go ahead and pull out of China (they’re still holding training camps/preseason games there now) until China backs down.
I was glad to see members of Congress take notice, and especially glad the letter was bipartisan. Would have liked to see more signatures, though.
What will the future US workforce look like if only 1% of the labor force needs to produce the food, and the manufacturing base is 8.5% now and let’s say declining to 5% through capital (robots) and outsourcing.
What the the other 94% do?
Edit, BLS link for reference. What do these “services” consist of?
They cash in their yang bucks and write poetry.
Just kidding. I reject the premise that we will ever be in a situation where 94% of people have nothing to do to ensure prosperity. But in the unlikely event that this happens, I predict a return to personal servants. Yes, this is crazy, but in my defense I did watch Downton Abbey this weekend.
94% may be a bit too high, but 90% may not be. It is not infeasible to think that automation allows for humans to be but supervisors from farming to mining to manufacturing, with self-driving trucks and drones doing the transportation.
Owners of the machines can then safely retire, but what about the common man? Luddites unite?
Consider the amount of people right now whose job consists of shuffling papers and discussing ideas, and that most of those jobs wont be eliminated. Anyone with an average IQ will find a job in some bureaucracy. I also expect construction/renovation to have a large workforce that will not be replaced and will hire alot of the displaced truck drivers and factory workers. In the event that there would be a large underclass receiving crumbs from the upper class, alot of the underclass will be hired as security forces for the upper class.
In summary, this is a non-linear chaotic system and any prediction is likely to be wrong.
Do you think that is because the papers need shuffling, or because other people will react negatively to workers of sound mind and body on the dole?
Think of the DMV. How many people there could be replaced with a touchscreen and an algorithm? Likewise, say, an insurance agency?
Yeah, I don’t understand why that would be a safe career type. It seems one that is highly likely to be automated and human personnel significantly scaled down or eliminated.
To the second point, who is buying the new houses or driving construction demand if the only people working are building houses?
Obviously there are ways to improve bureaucratic efficiency, and especially so at the DMV. What’s more, they dont involve robots and artificial intelligence. The reason this is not currently practiced more widely is a combination of factors, ranging from everyone playing CYA, union political pressure, and inertia, among others.
Yes, you can improve bureaucracy without AI, but you can improve it more (and reduce human personnel by a larger amount) with it. Not even AI really, but just a well designed…dumb system. Is there a proper industry term for that instead of “dumb system”?
To the general question: coaching, caring, and creating.
Coaching means everything from traditional schoolteachers to instructors of all sorts to life coaches to therapists. Caring means doctors, nurses, health aides, child care workers, elder care workers, animal care workers etc. Creating means not just poetry, but any sort of artistic or performance effort.
None of these are likely to be automated, because people will pay for the human touch in itself. And there are plenty of opportunities for the demand for these kinds of services to increase as people need less labor to provide other goods and services.
There will be a shift in who qualifies for these jobs versus the jobs of previous generations– for example, absent a shift in how boys are socialized, I would anticipate an increase in the employability of women relative to men– and there may be a large chunk who are unqualified for them regardless; but I doubt it’ll be anywhere close to a majority.
+1 to this.
Theoretically, automation could create bots that could simulate human touch well enough to satisfy this class of demand, but I expect that’s much further off, even if we suppose we’ve automated the improvement of bots.
@salvorhardin >
Hasn’t that already been happening?
precisely. and it will be some time before a robot servant is anywhere close to the equivalent of a human servant.
In a best case scenario, this, but unironically. Imagine most people using computer aided game development, or film production, or, yes, poetry, passing them around to little more than personal fulfillment while robots do the gruntwork.
Of course, there might be a bit of ennui when it is discovered that all the members of you micro-niche Sci-fi Poetry club are in fact bots designed to keep you placated with fake social connections–and yet still write better Star Trek Slam Poetry than you. Ah well, c’est le vie.
Can’t tell if reference or not….
I should say yes, because it works on multiple levels, but nope, stumbled into that serendipitously.
Of course, a lot of people will not consider this path to be a positive development.
Today it is a sign of wealth and class to:
-own handmade furniture
-drink good wine / craft beer
-eat food with ingredients made with as much extra work as possible
-own original pieces of art
It is also well respected and dignified to be an artisan who:
-farms heritage breed pigs
-does high-end carpentry and cabinetry
-makes bespoke anything
So while ‘hire a real live human to do your bidding,’ makes it sound like a negative development, in practice people now have a lot more options to make a living making cool stuff. The whole job of ‘craft brewer’ didn’t exist 30 years ago.
I don’t know, but I have a request: as manufacturing is taken over by robots, can we make some of them feminine and call them Rosie the Riveted?
Per your BLS Link:
Utilities: Plumber
Wholesale Trade: Buyers and sellers on a B2B level plus support staff, I suppose. The person at Costco who buys from P&G.
Retail Trade: the person who takes your money at the GAP
Transportation: Truck drivers and people who drive forklifts in Warehouses
Information: The Geek Squad.
Financial activities: Your banker and bank teller
Professional and business services: everyone who works in HR
Educational Services: teachers
Health Care: doctors, nurses, etc.
Leisure and hospitality: The guy who teaches you how to ski and the lady at the front desk who checks you in to your hotel, plus everyone who cleans your room
Lots and lots and lots and lots of service jobs exist. What’s the service economy of tomorrow that’s 80.7% services look like? A lot like the service economy of today, that’s 80.2% services.
Role by role:
Utilities: Agree – plumbers and electricians and also skilled trades are going to stick around for a while.
Wholesale Trade – algorithm plus automated logistics
Retail Trade: Have you seen the kiosks being introduced to fast food and the phone-pay system that China uses?
Transportation: For now, last mile local delivery is still needed, but cross-country highway routes can be automated soon, which will kill off small towns that rely on truckers to eat/lodge at the moment. Same for rail.
Information: Fewer and fewer geeks needed as “AI” improves
Financial activities: ATM locations don’t require too much staffing, brick & mortar branches transition to online banking
Pro & Business: HR is part of regulatory/bureaucracy so I’ll give you that
Educational Services: Ok, but teaching is notoriously undervalued in the US
Health Care: Med students already fleeing radiology, but for now sure, health care requires humans
Leisure & Hospitality: Ok
So the overall question is, if food and things come cheap and automated, what’s everyone up to? Ideally 10 hour work weeks, but the division of income is unlikely to work that way.
Retail Trade: automated fast food might exist, but that’s all so far. That still leaves selling everything from cars to home improvement parts to food that isn’t quite fast.
Also, we don’t yet have anything automated that carries stuff from the truck to the storage room, and then from the storage room to the auto-kiosk. (We do have Amazon warehousebots, but someone will still need to design them to insert the impossiburger pod into the correct slot on the McServer.
Also, expect the utilities industry to expand immensely to fix all those auto-kiosks and loaderbots when they break down.
Last mile delivery is one facet of a general reason why I think full automation is at least four generations away. There is a lot of last miles, and they vary from small towns in Texas to fishing communities in Alaska, rustic bungalows in the Shenandoah, dead-end communities around military outposts, and high-crime neighborhoods in Chicago. Automating these is the difference between clearing blockage in a major artery, and clearing blockage in every single capillary in the human body. Which is not to say it’s impossible, but that it will take at least a century, either to install everything by hand (hello, installation as an economic sector) or to automate automation itself.
The myriad problems surrounding last mile delivery, not to mention fixing a hundred thousand different types of bots, will grow the information industry, not shrink it. By extension, this will grow education as well. And since education is just mental last mile delivery, it will grow disproportionately as well.
If information labor doesn’t grow, that will be a bottleneck on automation. So will resource extraction, for that matter. Robots don’t grow on trees. Which means labor will likely shift toward those two as key sectors, and other sectors will follow along, and everything will be automated on gradually. I think it won’t feel particularly transformative relative to, say, the last twenty years.
As others have noted, we’re already pretty much there because your reduction of the productively useful economy to “agriculture and manufacturing” is a grossly misleading oversimplification. But if you meant to ask what happens when all of that plus the useful services get compressed to 6% of the population:
47% work for the various government bureaucracies that will put in jail anyone who tries to provide any useful good or service without completing their paperwork, less that good or service be in some way unsafe or environmentally damaging or it be in any way discriminatory to anyone, because we shall have ZERO TOLERANCE for any of that badness.
The other 47% will work for the various corporate bureaucracies that fill out the paperwork that may hopefully allow the 6% to do something useful without getting thrown in jail.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine carpal tunnel syndrome from filling out compliance forms to avoid an audit–forever.
Yes, I think I framed it poorly. The last (edited) line laid out the core question: what will future services look like since many existing services can be automated as well?
I think you vastly underrate how efficient government bureaucracies are at generating paperwork for the corporate bureaucrats to fill out. I’m guessing you’ll see 20% government and 74% corporate, max.
You’re forgetting that the government bureaucracies aren’t exempt from the requirement to fill out paperwork to get permission from other government bureaucracies before doing anything. In fact, I was sort of forgetting that to, so I’m going to update to 74% government, 20% corporate.
Dependent on the total population remaining the same.
With this technology making demographic transition more accessible, I expect sufficient wireheading-ish behavior that required labor force will increase from 1% via decrease in overall population.
I havent been following everything extremely closely, but my understanding is that the Dems intend to impeach Trump without having a formal vote to open an impeachment inquiry in the House. How irregular is this? Is this done to avoid giving House Republicans subpoena powers and the like? Yesterday my phone started giving me notifications from the Ministry of Truth (i.e. Apple News and Twitter News) saying that Trump said he wont cooperate with the impeachment. Did he say he wont cooperate unless an impeachment inquiry is voted on in the House, or that he wont cooperate in any circumstances?
A couple of things:
1. The impeachment is the final step in the process; you don’t vote to impeach and then have an inquiry, you have an inquiry and then vote to impeach. Once it comes time for impeachment, a vote in the House is constitutionally required.
2. The house is currently in recess and has been during the whole course of this mess. If Speaker Pelosi had wanted to call for an official vote, she would have had to wait until next Tuesday to do so. I’m not sure if there are added benefits with regards to not letting republicans have subpoena powers (IMO you can do that with simple committee majority).
3. His lawyer released a letter explaining why Trump won’t cooperate with the process. It’s legal reasoning is sketchy, and unlikely to hold up if this goes to court, however. The Constitution is pretty vague on what exactly the House can do before impeaching.
4. Yesterday. his lawyers refused to answer if Trump would cooperate with the impeachment process if the House voted on it. Just a gut call here, but it seems unlikely that in a week he’ll be happy to comply with these proceedings. Speaker Pelosi can easily force the issue, and everyone involves knows it.
It actually isn’t.
Article 1, section 2 (in part):
Article 1, section 5 (in part):
I don’t really see any other reading of this than that the House itself is the sole arbiter of how the House may proceed on impeachment inquiries.
By vague I mean that the constitution doesn’t explicitly list the steps the house has to follow when it is planning an impeachment. I agree that it gives the house the sole arbiter and endows them with the responsibility to decide the matter, but you’ll agree that isn’t quite a road map, right?
The House of Representatives has unilateral authority to set their own procedures. They could demand that Trump submit to a Trial-by-Ordeal if they wanted, and it would be perfectly constitutional.
NB: They don’t have the power to force anyone to participate in their process. So the demand letter is constitutional, but there’s nothing backing it except a threat that Trump will be impeached for not-complying with their impeachment process.
But Constitutionality / Legality isn’t really the big concern here. Instead, this is a pure political question. Both sides want to seem reasonable to voters.
Pelosi knows that Trump won’t get convicted by 2/3rds of the Senate. So, her “Victory Condition” is an investigation that drags out for several months and makes Trump look bad, followed by a bunch of attack ads against Republican Senators who voted for acquittal.
Trump’s “Victory Condition” is to make Pelosi’s process seem abusive, and force the Dems into either failing-to-impeach (and looking foolish), or sending a weak bill-of-impeachment to the Senate that lets McConnell spend a few weeks grandstanding about how the Dems are political.
Something of a quibble, but Pelosi knows this in the same way that we “knew” Donald Trump couldn’t win a general election. It assumes a great deal about future events being like current ones.
I would hardly say it’s a good bet that the Senate convicts, but depending on what comes out and when … nothing is set in stone.
I feel putting that on TV would really round out the experience of having former Reality TV star Donald Trump as President.
We’ve definitely entered Black Swan times. In 2015, “Will the Senate Republican majority impeach a Republican President?” would have been as obvious a “no” as “Will Mitch McConnell’s pubescent son sprout wings and fly to upstate New York?”
@Drew:
I’d like to propose the House demand Trial by Combat instead. The Democrats can choose any 73-year-old fighter in President Trump’s weight class.
Don’t forget that trial by cake is a legitimate form of Ordeal.
Hopefully, the anomaly now is the possibility that they might acquit on partisan grounds. Republican Nixon resigned in anticipation of being convicted by a Republican majority Senate, and it’s worrisome to think the norms responsible there could be permanently dead.
As opposed to the fully bipartisan, unbiased, and fair way the Democrats have behaved since January 2017?
@honoredb says:
Anomaly? Isn’t that exactly what they did with a Clinton who was unquestionably guilty of perjury?
Y’all seem to be in violent agreement with my thesis that norms have shifted between Nixon and Trump.
I sure am. I hear that politicians of different parties hardly drink together with each other any more.
@Le Maistre Chat
I insist that only the Speaker of the House should compete in the Challenge by Combat. If that happens, I won’t even care who wins.
Except we all know that Pelosi would promptly summon her champion, Dutch “The Mountain” Ruppersberger.
Then again, Trump would just bring in Gianforte, so who knows.
Thanks for that. Very informative.