ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Don't set ridiculous red lines that are easily broken.
I'm feeling a bit spammy at this point, but William Spaniel did it two months ago, and he called out this Wikipedia article in the process.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
There is still no deal that Putin would offer that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people would accept, and Trump's claim that he could end the war in 24 hours is laughable and delusional. Until at least one of Putin or Zelensky are utterly desperate, no peace will be possible.
A week or so ago, I posted a comment that appears to have been mostly ignored. In it, I referred to the work of William Spaniel, a political scientist of game theory and international conflict, who was in turn referring to a Trumpist think tank plan to end the war. Short short story is that it's basically a two-sided threat to make both Putin/Zelensky, well, not necessarily "utterly desperate", because from his academic view, you don't need utter desperation to make peace. Instead, simply shift their estimates of the costs/benefits enough to overcome whatever bargaining friction is still getting in the way. (One needs some Lines On Maps lore from his channel to understand that the major view of his discipline is that wars don't just happen because of substantive disagreements; you need both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction.)
That said, I think even Trump will have a harder time of it than he expects. Any pressure applied to Ukraine will also change Putin's calculus, insofar as it will incentivise him to exploit Ukraine's new weakness to push the lines of battle further in Russia's favour. Creating enough desperation on the Ukrainian side without creating corresponding greed on the Russian side will be a very hard needle to thread.
Maybe to go into slightly more detail, the proposed plan is not to try to simply manage Russian greed in some way. Instead, it's to just straight threaten them, too. If they don't agree to basically whatever Trump has decreed, he will flood Ukraine with unthinkable quantities of top-tier weapons (and remove many of those silly restrictions on them). That would shift Putin's calculus to being almost entirely about whether he actually can really escalate against a full-fledged and unleashed American proxy without being even more directly escalated on. Because if not, that's a pretty significant threat that opens up a wide range of plausible bargains.
I didn't go into full detail in my other comment, but he thinks that the spectre of Trump (and possibly this Trumpist plan) could have been part of the impetus for both Ukraine's Kursk offensive and also Russia's recent ramping up in the east. If they think that Trump could get elected, roll in, threaten the crap out of both of them, and just up and declare that he thinks the solution should be X (plausibly with it corresponding to the current state of the war, with some horsetrading), and if at that point they'd have nothing better to do than accept, then they're both incentivized to rapidly ramp up as much as they can and make as many gains as they can now, before Trump draws his line, probably even if it's unsustainable.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
The nuclear establishment is completely controlled by the feds
Don't we already have a solution for that? Nuclear sanctuary cities! Make the feds actually come use their own guns to deport your power plants.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
It's somewhat relevant to the discussions about the federal government workforce. The federal government employs a lot of people, and those people aren't being spewed out by a magic high-IQ-only people factory; they're just regular people, from the regular population. Some are really smart and capable; others, less so. Different agencies have different dynamics that draw from different subsets of the population.
There is a legend in the research community of a new director taking charge of one of the national labs and saying in his first appearance in front of the workforce some form of, "We know that 50% of you don't want to do anything. That's fine. We're not going to make you; we won't fire you. Just don't get in the way of the other 50%."
The reason for this legend is not overly linked with any dynamic particular to the federal government, but it has a slightly special form in such places. There is a long, complicated story about the inherent difficulty of evaluating research efforts. In every industry, you'll have people who frankly do not have the skills or ability to contribute to the actual mission/bottom line, but they obviously don't want to have that figured out. They might lose their job! So, they try to make it kind of look like they're doing something, even if it's dumb/not productive. In industries where it's harder to evaluate whether something is actually contributing, there's a lot more room for this to flourish. Also in industries that are so bloody rich that they can sort of afford to scattershot all over the place a little and not worry too much about economy. See also the tech industry in some recent times. The federal government has a bit of both floating around. Depending on the agency, their mission may be more/less well-defined. Some pockets clearly think that their mission is approximately everything. Some defense orgs definitely think this, as it's extremely easy to slide down the slope of thinking that you have to account for literally every possible situation, every possible contingency, every idea that could be used against you or by you to gain an advantage.
Couple these two things (a workforce so large really isn't drawn from just the best and brightest) and such a broad mix of groups being more-or-less mission-focused and more-or-less clear on what contributes to that mission, and you inevitably get allllllllll sorts of pretty random crap. Some is really really good; some is, well.
I'm riffing on all this in part to say that there will definitely be some obvious low-hanging fruit for Elon/Vivek, but there is also just such a massive diversity of agencies that have such different missions, different needs, different levels-of-evaluability, that it will likely be a lot more difficult than Elon just rolling in to Twitter and saying, "Everybody bring the code you've written in the last year directly to Elon." Sure, if they have the time and inclination to scratch and sniff down to small groups like this, they'd find some set of people who say, "I take the Latin from the internet and put it in the goddamn logo!" But a lot of times, they'll get some mountain of hazy documentation about 'work' that is supposedly in line with a mission that may be extremely sprawling, unclear, and questionable in the first place. But it might actually be good-ish! Hard to tell without a deep dive and lots of expertise... multiplied over and over again in thousands of different domains that require all different sorts of expertise. Godspeed, Elon... godspeed.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
I'm definitely thinking about this classic banger. Of course, before he goes into the dynamics of how leaving has a good chance of going poorly, he basically makes a case that conservatives were probably right that "mainstream" "neutral" institutions actually were biased against them. This leads me to wonder, as someone who does not have a Twitter account, what is the steelman of the liberal claim that Twitter has now become actually biased against them?
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a category for things other than "mandatory" and "banned"?
ControlsFreak
8d ago
I actually enjoy teaching, but the opportunity cost of displacing research time is too high. I think the way to isolate this question is to hypothesize a literally magical offer: you have an almost entirely-filled research life with your typical 24 hour days, and you can choose to either keep that as it is or get some number of bonus hours that can only be used to teach. I'm sure some people would dislike teaching, itself, enough to just reject the bonus hours. I'd kinda like them.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Ya know, I had that in my mind at one point, and I know I had gotten busy and distracted last night, and I partially forgot it. And yet, I think I still had a point. We've talked here recently about how generally hyperbolic and castastrophizing many left-wing online spaces are (which is why I called that out in my comment). Like, just look at reddit. And then, if a potential normie waltzes into the space (think what's happening with young voters), they see that all this hyperbole is Obvious Nonsense if you've ever touched grass (or, ya know, watched a Pens game with a Republican). But they also learn that if you even think about disagreeing with the hyperbole, it's the banhammer for you. It's radicalizing, one way or the other; either you're radicalized to join the herd and spout hyperbole... or you're radicalized to hate those folks. In captured spaces, the hyperbole just ratchets one way, up ever further. They're not just wrong; they're dehumanizing or threatening your existence.
Honestly, the last thing folks like AOC need to do is quadruple down again with the catastrophic rhetoric. Especially because you're saying this in the process of moving your own position closer to theirs! Simply say what they're actually wrong about and why and how you'd do something better. Tarring everyone who has ever supported anything like what you're moving your own policy position closer to as having dehumanized entire groups of people is just gross and insulting.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Does the guy you watched the Pens game with last night lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and dehumanize immigrants almost completely?
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up.
This is the type of hyperbole that makes me find it completely impossible to hang out in online forums dominated by lefties for very long. Like, have you ever talked to a Republican? In person?
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I'm missing anything here about budgets and R's "slash[ing them] so much". Will we be getting to that soon?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
All you have to do is click the link and then click max for the duration.
You're trying to change goalposts again to individual compensation packages, not something about budgets. Please just pick one set of goalposts and stick with them.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
That again suffers a denominator problem. That other sorts of spending have exploded doesn't tell us much about what you're making claims about. Perhaps something like this would show the precipitous decline that very neatly corresponds to some notable R actions taken? (Click max x-axis, I don't remember how to embed that into the link.)
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Where is your evidence that the personnel budgets have been constrained, specifically, especially given that I mentioned a significant shift in the composition of the workforce by pay scale?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.
I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.
These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I was able to speak this evening with someone I know who works in a suitable job, suitably high up, for a large multi-national. They also pushed back a bit, but I was able to prod. That company has fleet vehicles for a few categories of folks, many of which are plausibly job-needs-based. Some of those job-needs seemed like they might be replaceable by an ACaaS. Probably the biggest one that wouldn't have worked was a set of positions where they would be visiting multiple locations each day with overnight stays along the way. The problem here is actually kind of subtle, because it's not the first problem you'd think of with Uber. With Uber, your first problem would be that you may just be heading from town to town on your trip, so you might not get a human who wants to drive out there. With ACaaS, if the same company runs in the neighboring town, it can just join the fleet there. No, the problem was that then you'd have to pull your suitcase out of the trunk every time you got to a new location, and you're visiting 3-4 of them before you stop for the night!
Beyond job needs, this multi-national gives every single VP or higher a fleet vehicle. Why? Honestly, my interlocutor explained the reasoning, and there was nothing there that really made a distinction. Why not offer it to one level below VP, even a cheaper car (they offer different tiers of cars to different levels already)? No real reason. It would cost money. But it costs money to give them to VPs and up, too. At one point, the explanation was that the people high up enough already made so much money that they didn't want any more cash, so it was about finding other perks for them. (I lol'd a bit.) I guess you can save a little in taxes. I didn't dig in to details of how they compute it, but I was told that they do have a monthly charge on their paycheck to cover whatever taxable portion; it seemed like they didn't have much detailed paperwork and that it was a mostly fixed monthly charge; it also seemed pretty cheap. We consulted with ChatGPT about reasons to offer company cars, and it threw in that there could be cost benefits by making a deal with an auto company to buy higher volume for cheaper or to save on insurance.
Reason after reason just didn't draw a line. "It's a status symbol." Well, if your employees were all some multiplier more productive, couldn't you give one level below VPs their slightly lower status symbol, and give more expensive status symbols up the chain? Basically, it's expensive. If it was cheaper, I guess they could throw the perk around a bit more. Of course, like any perk, some employees might not even value it much; might prefer cash. My wife complains that her salary is lower because they offer health insurance, even though she doesn't use it, because she's on my insurance.
I was at some point told that those folks definitely didn't need company cars. In fact, when I poked around with whether something like Uber/ACaaS could make any sense if it could be done at the right price point, I was told that it would absolutely be just fine for those folks who are getting their car just because they're a VP-or-higher. Okay-ish for some job-needs. Just don't have a suitcase.
Their view, from the perspective of a multi-national, would be that it would be extremely localized. You mention some of the factors. Are you paying for parking passes? How much does that cost in your area? Would they be transiting in/out otherwise? If your city is going to hell in a handbasket, what's the value of making sure your valuable-enough employee doesn't get stabbed in the subway? We sort of settled on the idea that some set of factors could make it plausible in some places (again, the price point is a huge driver). But you're not going to have the same case in Peoria that you would in NYC or wherever.
They also told me that there are, indeed, folks in the business who are, for lack of a better word, agitating for the company to subsidize commuting costs for more employees. And it seems like this sort of Uber type thing is vaguely in scope of one of the ways they're proposing to do that below the level of company cars. I'm more of a 'just give me cash' kinda person, unless, like I said, there is some very acute parking situation or something that really aligns the business incentives.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be)
I'll jump off from this point.
Aside from just being an Elon dream, I think a lot of potential Autonomous Cars As A Service (ACaaS) would seriously consider whether EVs are in their interest (at least in areas where the weather is such that EVs make sense at all). Per-mile energy costs tend to be lower, and I haven't kept up with the stats on current models, but there are simplicity reasons to believe that, for a given level of non-propulsive tech in a car, simply swapping out ICE for electric can plausibly reduce maintenance costs (practical numbers would definitely be needed for battery replacement on a car running taxi service every day compared to a comparable ICE). So, there are inherent reasons for the service providers to want to consider EVs.
Anyway, let's get to building a model. I'll start with the premise that we pretty much just model the vast majority of peak traffic as commuter traffic, the timing/quantity of which we hold essentially fixed. I'll also assume for now that the autonomous taxi service supplies almost all of the commuter traffic. Crucially, this model doesn't really say almost anything about the total number of cars owned or the number that are personally owned. People may still keep the same number of cars at home, in their garage all week, ready to use for the weekends, trips to grandma's, etc. I think there's a lot of confusion in the thread that is flipping back and forth between ownership and utilization. In any event, I think this model is somewhat like what you have in mind in your example.
Now, basically all of the service's EVs have presumably magically found a home to cheaply charge all night, presumably somewhere in the suburbs where it's hopefully cheap. Given the current 200-300mi range, they can basically all come online and 'work' through the morning rush hour(s). I think there are a couple crucial questions, one which you've brought up, but another which I think has been missing. First, "How much do they deadhead during rush hour?" Second, "Do they have to charge to make it through the evening rush hour? If so, what method would they prefer?"
For deadheading, the simplest model is to just to assume that there is approximately zero demand to go in the opposite direction of the main commuter traffic. To a first approximation, a small amount of deadheading has the obvious cost of driving back trading off with a reduction in the number of vehicles the ACaaS has to operate. Presumably, an ACaaS startup will have a nerd in the back room doing calculations with a more detailed model of traffic, and I think this would be a key parameter. Obviously, as you point out elsewhere, as that parameter increases, you run the risk of tipping into two-way congestion, which would also increase the cost of deadheading. But something else to note is that, in this simple model, this parameter is pretty directly correlated to the number of cars that potentially end up somewhere in the urban area through midday. That is, for example, if each autonomous commuter taxi makes one deadhead trip to pick up another commuter, and we assumed that each commuter would have brought one vehicle into the urban area, we've reduced the number of vehicles in the urban area during midday by half. It's very directly (inversely, lol) just a 1/(N+1) relation. At what value of N does two-way congestion really start to become a problem? I haven't the foggiest. Hell, it could even be a non-integer less than one; I have truly no idea.
An important challenge of this model to people who are pro-ACaaS is that they really kind of need to say what sort of N they're expecting, would be okay with, and think is plausible. Else, they need to propose something specific that the model is wrong about that can plausibly make their other claims work. If they're not okay with nonzero N, they better have something good, or we might think they're slipping magic into their imprecise model.
Of course, in the simplest model, we don't super care about congestion in the other direction except to the extent it increases the cost of deadheading. That is, the simplest model is that it was a wide open, completely empty freeway heading back to the suburb, and nobody cares if a bunch of deadheading empty ACaaS are clogging it. One would need more complications in the model to capture anything else.
N is not just limited by cost and two-way congestion considerations; it's also limited by time constraints. If an average round trip takes an hour, for example, you can't make more than a couple within the peak hours. This also leads us to the second question about charging. If you're driving back and forth for N trips for a few hours in the morning, do you need to charge to make it through the rest of your day?
EV owners typically prefer slower charging, as it's cheaper and better for the battery, reducing their lifetime costs (ACaaS operators may also have incentives to just abuse the hell out of their batteries; typical taxis certainly have incentives to abuse the hell out of their cars). Of course, if it's sitting there charging more slowly, it's not making any fares. But if it's lollygagging around in traffic trying not to do anything so as to conserve energy, it's not making any fares either. In this model, there's not many fares to be had at this time, so it's kinda dead time anyway. I think I see three options: 1) Not pay for a spot to park half of the afternoon, just eat the cost of fast charging, then hold up traffic conserving energy, 2) Pay to take up a spot for a while, but get cheaper slower charging, 3) Just drive back out of town to get cheaper slower charging without paying the spot fee.
To flesh out a hopeful possibility for (2), though, as the morning rush tapers off, they could start to duty cycle off for charging. Math would need to be done, but if you need your duty cycle to be Y% through the day, you'll have Y% of your peak capacity available. Hopefully, those nerds in the back will figure out how to get that percentage right so that you have enough charge left in enough tanks to get through the evening peak.
But then, I think the math conclusion is that, during the day, between rush hours, Y% of the autonomous taxis will be roaming for possibly cheap fares (maybe still doing bad energy conservation stuff), whereas (100-Y)% of them will be charging somewhere. So, we won't have peak rush hour quantities of cars on the road all the time throughout the day. Also, even assuming that the entire (100-Y)% of chargers are finding their charge homes in the urban area, that's plausibly still a lot fewer charging parking spaces than would normally be housing the full 100% of peak traffic all day that we currently have. Ya know, if the limit on N will allow it. The hope and promise here over individually-owned vehicles would be that you save on parking, can recoup some costs with deadheading, and even getting some fares on a duty cycle in the afternoon is worth more than having it sit in the parking garage all day while you're working.
Obviously, there are a ton of detailed cost comparisons that would have to be made. But I think that EVs are potentially different from ICEs in that essentially the only sensible model of 'charging' the latter is 'fast charging', at one given price point. I'm sure someone out there will make some models/approximations where they say, "Assume our average charging voltage through the afternoon is V," then proceed to compute duty cycles, cost of charging, impacts on maintenance, expected fares in the slow periods, cost of however many parking/charging spaces they need at that duty cycle, etc.
We'd kinda need to search out the space of at least (N,Y,V). I don't know if there will be any ranges of parameters that work for any models with real-world costs/traffic patterns/etc., and they may all end up with perverse incentives like, "Poke around and hold up traffic all afternoon." But I also kinda don't think I'm comfortable concluding that there is no range of parameters at all where it might make sense. I kinda just think we'd need a more sophisticated model. I also think the most likely conclusion would be, "It does not make sense for ACaaS to grow all the way to the point of providing all of the commuter traffic," and the model would get more complicated still, as one would have to vary the quantity of commuter traffic they think they could capture.
As a note, ChatGPT pulled a number out of its giant inscrutable matrix and estimated that traffic volumes during peak hours are often 30-50% higher than midday, rising above 100% in certain cities like NY/LA/London. I honestly have no other frame of reference in my mind to know if that's a complete fabrication or is in the right order-of-magnitude, but it could give a modeler some start in estimating plausible duty cycles (I mean, not exactly giving us Y, but maybe something like it?). Probably the simplest starting assumption would be that all of that midday traffic is entirely in the urban area, but obviously that's not "correct", and again, one would need a more complicated traffic model.
One final note is that nothing in this simple model has any dynamics. There's no, "Well, A got cheaper, so more people decided to B, so..." It's a purely static model, in line with your scenario.
ControlsFreak
11d ago
I agree with your conclusions from the standpoint of personal ownership as the situation currently is. People do like to have "their" car, even if it's "just in case". While there is some percentage of folks out there who have chosen to forgo personal ownership (or, say, downgraded their household from two to one car), it's not very significant yet. Significant price decreases across the board for autonomous cars won't necessarily change the perspective of the individual, as they'd see a similar price decrease on the side of personal ownership as well.
However, riffing a bit on vague thoughts, what if the demand signal came from businesses? I have a vague thought that, sometimes, services which once made financial sense only for particular, highly-remunerated employees may sort of trickle down the chain as the cost to the business decreases. (E.g., when work phones or flights are really expensive, businesses only pay for them for a small number of employees that are a) worth it to provide the perk and get the employee, and/or b) whose productivity gains would offset the cost.) So, I'm thinking, something like how the NFL has extremely highly-paid employees, some of whom are liable to get themselves into trouble with their cars or whatever. So the league offers a car service that will come pick them up and take them anywhere, at any time. Expensive? Absolutely. Worth it to them? Possibly. Lower down the chain, other companies buy company cars for high-level employees. Could be fleet-owned; could be subsidizing a personal purchase. It's a perk and form of compensation, as well as a bit of confidence that they'll be driving a newer, maintained vehicle, and aren't going to have to take unfortunate days off because of car issues. Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
Uber is already targeting business. 'Offer commuting services to your employees,' they say. It's a perk to the employee, a way of compensating them; it's cheaper to the business than those other things. There could be perverse incentives, but presumably, the business can say things like, "We'll compensate up to this amount of commute, and if you choose to live further, you'll have to cost share," or something. But they'll get to work every day. It's easy to add in if they need to drive across the city occasionally for business, without jumping all the way to a company car. Maybe when you're negotiating that new lease for office space, you can also say that you only need twenty reserved parking spaces in the building's lot/garage, not a hundred. Uber is betting that they can get to a price point where maybe you used to offer company cars to your C-suite, but now you can offer Uber Business + Commutes to all your VPs as well.
If autonomous vehicles cut the cost of this service down even more, how far down the chain do the perks go? Probably not all the way, not 100%. But can it increase enough to make some money? Uber is betting that it can. Businesses don't care about limit arguments of, "Oh, what if tens of years down the line, the number of autonomous vehicles is approaching 100%; what are urban planners gonna do about deadheading?" They don't care what Autonomous Uber chooses to do with those cars once they've dropped off their employees. If it makes economic sense, they'll just do it. Unless and until, of course, the @Rov_Scam folks start to slap laws around to kill it. That's a problem for the urban planners and Uber to fight about. They just want to attract the best employees and make sure they get to where they need to work every day.
Now, if Uber is right and businesses actually start adopting this sort of thing more, it actually can change some amount of the personal calculation. It's not, "I have to do the math on a cost comparison, and I have to take the risk of surge pricing or delays in getting a driver, and I have to figure out whether the complicated set of tradeoffs allow me to put my personal faith and reputation in this service enough to consider having our household go to one fewer vehicle." Instead, it's, "Well, so my commute is covered. I don't have to think about that. I'm not going to save money by just choosing to not use it. Now, what do we want to have for personally-owned vehicles?"
ControlsFreak
11d ago
The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking.
Instead of thinking like an urban planner, can we think like an entrepreneur? What business models are possible if you're expecting for there to be a bunch of autonomous cars showing up downtown early in the morning and wanting to head back to the suburbs, making such transit super cheap? Cheap breakfast delivery from your centrally-located kitchen? (Heck, sell the 'premium' autonomous ride into work that comes with breakfast in it for you, having picked it up before it deadheaded your way...) Cheap delivery of business goods to outlying locations? Amazon is currently delivering to your doorstep, but would suburban customers be okay with an autonomous vehicle with a robot arm or something that can at least dump your package at the end of your driveway? Could they design a dual-purpose vehicle that can bring a passenger into the city, turn around, deliver some number of packages in the suburb, then pick up another passenger?
(Note that this is not a sort of argument that we'd get to 100% autonomous vehicles, but just thinking that if there is value in substitution on some margins, this may be a new margin that could be opened up.)
ControlsFreak
12d ago
CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I got curious in just asking, "What was the largest deportation operation in American history to date," i.e., what's the line he has to beat? Operation Wetback? Wiki says something about a little over a million "returns", but I'm fresh to the immigration lingo and had to look into "returns" vs. "removals". I guess that "returns" can include anyone who is caught, but basically doesn't fight it in court; just says, "Ya got me; take me hoooommmeeeee." Whereas "removals" have formal deportation orders. I believe that a "return" could also include silly examples, like an example of someone I heard about who screwed up and applied for their visa too early (for another country) such that it expired before they got there, but nobody caught it before they flew there, so they were turned back at the airport.
So, I wonder which curve is he getting graded on? Then I found that removals were still stupid low in the years of Operation Wetback compared to more recent times. Returns at that time look to be about 2/3rds of the peak. Eyeballing totals would put the peak in 2000, something like 1.85M (driven by the peak in returns, around 1.7M). Removals peaked in 2013 at about 400k. There's a few more years in the less-immediately-readable more recent yearbook.
Concretely, on what metric would this prediction market resolve?
ControlsFreak
12d ago
I see a lot of discussion here about Ukraine and the future of the conflict, touching on the different parties' interests, positions, negotiating leverage, etc. I'll admit that I often just skim them and don't dive in, but from what I've seen, I don't think there's a lot of discussion of the Center for American Security1 plan. I only mention it because it came up in another recent William Spaniel video, post-election. For those who don't know, William Spaniel is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on the game theory of interstate conflict/bargaining, and he also has a relatively prolific youtube channel. I've been watching it for a while, well before the war stuff mostly took over, just interested in his game theory videos and how to apply that lens to thinking about war. In any event, he doesn't seem to be pro-Trump at all; I'd say he's somewhat anti-Trump, but definitely not rabidly so.
In the linked video, he talks about the developments in Ukraine over the last few months, saying that it is rather plausible to believe that both the Kursk offensive and the recent Russian acceleration could be chalked up to the possibility of an incoming Trump administration, which has stated that it wants to end the war posthaste. Of course, the typical response to the Trump administration's stated goal is that things don't happen just because Prime Minsters Presidents are very keen on it. Neville Chamberlain was very keen on peace (also). And then, depending on the valence of the speaker, they usually assume that this means that Trump will have to throw America's lot in with the Russians, stop supporting Ukraine, and force them to acquiesce to a peace deal. However, Spaniel points out that if this CFAS plan is the route Trump chooses to go, he does have other tools in the toolbox.
My summary of his summary is that Trump can essentially pick any resolution that is at least plausibly in the middle and then use the stick on both sides. If Ukraine doesn't agree to whatever Trump has decreed, then Trump will drop military support for Ukraine. If Russia doesn't agree to whatever Trump has decreed, then Trump will flood Ukraine with even more and better weapons. It's like an attempt to make a reverse prisoners' dilemma. It's not immediately clear how to think through all the plausible negotiating developments, especially Russia's possible options for escalation, and one would have to be somewhat steeped in Spaniel's lines on maps lore to really feel how intuitively plausible it is, but suffice to say that Spaniel, himself, mostly treats it as though, from a mathematical standpoint, it's really plausible enough that he didn't even really go into any caveats (at least in this video) about the difficulties that might arise in the negotiation. He almost treated as though Trump really could simply declare what the resolution will be (so long as it's sufficiently in some range), and the dual threat of America's mighty power (or lack thereof) really could simply make it so (likely modulo a minor amount of horsetrading). It's in that context that he describes the theory of why such a plan, and the prior probability of Trump winning the election, could have played a role in the two sides' strategies over the last few months.
What says The Motte? Is he giving the idea too much credence? Has he missed something? Why hasn't this sort of plan already happened?2 If it does happen, what sort of video will Spaniel be making in a few months after it's done? Will he be talking about what types of commitments will need to be made to "keep it so"? What would those look like?
1 - Part of the "America First Policy Initiative" think tank, if such a term can be applied; not to be confused with the Center for New American Security
2 - I can think of a few theories... perhaps a divided Congress prevented the dual threats from being credible; perhaps only Nixon Trump can go to China Russia and credibly threaten to really turn up the heat; perhaps Russia does have plausible escalation strategies to defang the threat...
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I do wonder if that's part of the shift in the youth vote. Youth tend to be somewhat rebellious. Yet, in almost every online forum, complete ideological purity is demanded, with increasing levels of Obvious Nonsense being declared doctrine, leading to utter hysteria. Any young person who observes that even one item of Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense either learns extremely quickly to somehow suppress their intellect... or they promptly get banned from half the internet.
They say that social death is worse than real death. The internet basically is social life in [Current Year]. Thus, I'd imagine that seeing that even minor observations that Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense gets one banned from half the internet (which is basically akin to social death) is significantly radicalizing, in one way or the other.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”.
There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.
Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.
If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.
On the first point, I don't think the requirement (from his academic view) is that it needs to be a decisive move or push the Russians back to the 2022 borders; it just needs to be enough of an increased threat of costs (on both sides) to overcome the bargaining friction that is keeping the war going. I've been kind of slow to take on this sort of mental shift after watching his videos for a while, but I'm finding the logic relatively more compelling over time.
On the second point, I don't really know. I don't pay attention to all the details of political campaigns. My non-hyper-focused read was that he just campaigned on, "The war is really bad and destructive; I'm going to end it; I'll do it immediately; don't ask me how." I don't know that he ever really committed to any sort of plan. It's worth pointing out here that this includes him not committing to this think tank plan... or even really ever acknowledging it at all, as far as I know. It's just an idea that's out there that seems interesting and has bounced around in my mind.
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