EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
I’m absolutely horrified. But much like how Trump won despite his horrific comments, there’s more to elections than merely comments like that. I’m fervently hoping it’s not a sign of things to come.
I’m not totally convinced that this provided an actual positive bump for Jones though. Would need to look into it more.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
Do you think the enormous population of federal workers in Virginia combined with the DOGE and shutdown stuff is wholly or only partially responsible for the wave?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
then people finger-wag over "but Jesus said be nice!" as if that was the whole of the Gospel.
Okay, sure. But. Really you do need both the “great commandments in the law”, Jesus was pretty darn clear about it:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Yes, duty to God comes before duty to your neighbor. That’s quite Biblical and Christian. But you can’t look at the actual collected words of Jesus and with a straight face and say it’s only “primarily” about serving God. You must have both. That they are ordered priorities does not grant leave to ignore the second on mere fear of being lazy on the first.
It seems you seem to be saying that overemphasizing love for your neighbor as a PR strategy will backfire by confusing Christians themselves about their own priorities? I don’t really buy that. It’s incredibly common for groups to have PR strategies slightly different than their own internal goals. Yes, bleedthrough can happen, but it doesn’t seem so existential to me.
While secular do-gooding doesn’t convert anyone, it is in a loose sense a prerequisite. Someone must think you’re a ‘good person’ before taking an interest in the more faith-oriented aspects. Any theory about Christianity making a comeback must acknowledge this, what to me seems a pretty fundamental fact.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!” Trump’s amoral and even explicitly anti-Christian character is well known and most evangelicals - the ones aside from a minority that fell into the personality cult (idol worship) - seemed to have concluded exactly this: who cares if he is personally odious if he gives them what they want (a potential champion VP, SC dominance, generalized right wing laws)?
If for some reason it wasn’t clear, this will backfire, like it always does. The shortcut to power and respect and moral victory is always a shortcut. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants. They need to offer help to the poor, associate with the downtrodden, praise and seek humility and virtue, resist the temptations of domination, pride, vanity, wrath, cover-ups, revenge, and immorality. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love. You can make bold stands, as long as at least you’re occasionally demonstrating forgiveness. There’s a reason even Jewish law had periodic jubilees, granting debt relief and freedom, and that was the lesser law.
This is the only way an increasingly secular America will be tempted back towards a Christian path. The communities need to be strong and “so good they can’t ignore you”. Revenge is not a Christian concept. In fact the opposite. Yet some evangelicals have embraced the doctrine of revenge. And as you say, some Catholics have embraced a doctrine of domination, equally as antithetical.
Along those lines, your comment about winning respect in both fields. I think that said respect should be idealized as happening in spite of differing opinions. You know, “disagree better”, which maybe sounds short term foolish but long term is way better at persuadability. The cardinal sin of modern woke-style liberals has been burning bridges, carrying out moral purges, and claiming that differing values means exclusion and shaming is correct. In the short term they had their decade of power, but as we now see in the medium term it’s limited their coalition significantly. Conservatives and Christians alike should not make the same mistake. No-contact means no future persuadability due to decreased interaction surfaces. To be clear, exclusion can be an important Christian tool, and with good scriptural basis too; it’s just that said tool is one to be used with extreme caution.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7d ago
Is a platformer, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is pretty fun (though far better with more like 3-4 players) where you place blocks and traps and gadgets and then run to the goal simultaneously, so if someone is winning via a certain route or too easily, you plop down a buzzsaw or something in their way.
Had some great fun with Out of Space, where you have to slowly work your way through your spaceship and "clean" the rooms and enemies to death. But you really need to do some coordination, as leaving places unclean for too long will develop little tumors that eventually turn into new alien enemies. And some later ones need to be defeated via certain means: a broom, or a mop, or water, etc. You slowly can install new stuff in your rooms that helps you as you progress through, and sometimes you lose a room back to attrition but it's usually still fine.
Vampire Survivors is an easy classic, and doesn't even require anything more than a movement stick (or WASD), but manages to be plenty fun even so.
If you have separate machines, honestly Assassin's Creed Unity turned out pretty fun if that's your kind of thing, though that's more gameplay than straight co-op.
Untitled Goose Game is an absolute gem and very funny to play with two.
Personally, I kind of like Heave Ho. You are this kind of simple two-armed dude with sticky hands, and you often need to swing along with your partner, coordinated, to jump certain gaps or "climb" around and underneath obstacles to get to the goal. Easy to screw up and funny when doing so (for most).
Hat in Time is a cute N64-like platformer with co-op, without the crazy kind of platforming, though I can't remember how crazy the camera is.
Also, honestly there are some great board games out there - BoardGameArena has quite a few, including for free (though a cheap subscription makes it easier), that you might find interesting. A lot easier when there's no setup and the stuff is all calculated for you/it's impossible to accidentally break the rules, so that can make many board games way more accessible. My parents play it all the time with each other.
A lot of people like Magicka (and sequel), but I never really got into it. Stardew Valley works pretty well on a technical level, but to me loses some of its charm especially w/r/t tasks around town.
Rubber Bandits finally is a fun cartoony one where your 3d/2d type guys try to rob various vaults.
Sorry I guess these aren't so much strategy-like games, but the above are ones that were big hits with my more casual-gaming roommates. If you're into the vibe, Stellaris can be kind of fun as a co-op game.
(And of course recently there is It Takes Two and Split Fiction - plus, if you never tried Portal 2's co-op, that's a MUST)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
A fun horror game recommendation from someone who hates horror movies and also most horror games: Signalis. More atmospherically and thematically creepy than jump scare-y, with great pixel-ish art reflecting a neat sci-fi Eastern German communist aesthetic, it's got some fun gameplay and some neat psychological light-touch story. It turns out I vastly prefer atmospheric-type games to the outright gross-out or jump-scare or pee-your-pants anxiety scare games. I do kind of wonder if there are many others that count. The point-and-click sounds interesting, though I usually find them far less engaging than more RPG or adventure-type games.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
No, move him back down. Newsom did put out an endorsement that same day, and was in fact one of the first to do so, so I wouldn't give him too much credit there. So the inclusion of this text in the book is actually a smear against a potential rival and a mischaracterization. Not that I'm going to cry any rivers about it
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Interestingly enough, it recently came out that Obama had agreed with Pelosi not to endorse Kamala too soon, as they were hoping for a mini primary. But Pelosi broke her promise early due to peer pressure. Especially since several other would-be opponents took themselves out of contention pretty quickly - I think that fact gets lost a little bit in the narrative, but that was a big deal. Day 1 consisted of Biden and the Clintons endorsing Kamala, Obama publicly urging something more deliberate (but vague), and a few governors including Newsom endorsing. Day 2 was Whitmer and Pritzker and Shapiro and Pelosi. Also, Dean Phillips endorsed but wanted a straw poll or something, but this was ignored. Day 3 was Schumer and Jeffries, and by then it's over. In other words, by the second day there wasn't any frontrunner even considering not backing Kamala, so it's kind of doubtful a primary would even have made sense.
Part of that was not so much about money, but a few filing deadlines that were only a few days away. I'm not completely sure how influential/accurate that point was, though. Ultimately, if a primary was going to happen, Biden would have had to push for it right away.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Biden has very little influence. He has cancer, he's bitter at people, he's blamed by almost everyone in turn, his presidential library (a useful barometer) has been receiving hardly any donations, and he never extended much trust to people outside the inner circle in the first place so it's no surprise as there weren't many true-believers to begin with. And he even managed to dumpster his own reputation in record time with stuff like breaking his promise and pardoning his family (handing an invitation to Trump on a golden fucking platter to abuse the pardon power himself). I'm a moderate, I liked Biden as a person, I even liked some of the stuff about his governance, but that last bit alone was more damning that anything else he ever did, in my eyes.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
She's trying to sell books likely because she heard (somewhat incorrectly) that it's a good way to earn money. I mean, who is going to hire her? Maybe some kind of lazy progressive nonprofit, but that seems it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
To his credit, the interviewer specifically picked up on this:
One could conceivably think that he could do the job through January, 2025, but that it was not wise to think he could do the job through January, 2029, right?
It’s not my place to say.
What do you mean it’s not your place to say?
No, no, no. Wait, I’m answering the question. I did not see anything that would cause me concern. That is my answer.
Except the debate, and the other things that everyone saw?
What I’m saying to you is the debate for me was one time. I had never seen him like that before.
So basically refusing to even answer the (real, 2029) question. Sadly, not new - that was the whole initial bit, was how the Biden campaign would insist "he's fine now" and then go silent when asked if his trajectory was stable enough to last through 2029. The debate wasn't just a shocker because it was at odds with "he's fine now", but also because it established a clear downward trajectory, you didn't even need to extrapolate that much; you could simply look at the 2020 debates and the difference was obvious.
Kamala, by the way, is deliberately cultivating the "I'm going to drop out of politics" angle, it wasn't accidental. She knows that only after losing she can drop the "our politics is broken" line, and thus attempt to curry favor with the disenfranchised "fellow kids". You're probably right about the Harris angle, and furthermore since Kamala obviously doesn't have a good grasp on what kinds of things are actually persuasive, she might even blithely bring KJP back.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
She fried her brain by too much time as Press Secretary, so her habits of deny, deflect, redirect, pretend to be "clear" are too strong when talking to journalists. Kind of fascinating from a psych perspective. I've said this before but most people don't appreciate how much politicians often end up ideologically captured by their own roles. Lots of people have this idea that every politician is a spineless weasel who will say anything to win if it matches their lane, but this is just wrong. Politicians often have silver tongues, but that's because it's an adaptive benefit on average. It doesn't have much to do with their core beliefs. Many, many politicians end up playing a role so long they come to believe it.
Part of me wonders if this is another puzzle piece behind why the Senate and Congress has been having so much trouble recently. Too much time talking to the media, and not nearly enough time locked in a room with each other. Older more historical Congresses, where you literally do need to sit your butt in a seat and listen to the speeches, had some kind of built in incentive to talk with each other, if not compromise. But nowadays, it seems like even if you do meet across the aisle, half the time it has to be in secret. Which is why that blowup a few years back about policing who could show up at certain DC restaurants was actually a big deal.
(Also, Chotiner definitely knew what he was doing posting this, as you can tell by the technically-accurate but definitely-throwing-shade summary line "Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.")
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9d ago
(I mean mathematically correct in the sense that Kolmogorov isn't technically the only game in town with internal axiomatic consistency, though it's universal enough in use I was probably being overly pedantic there)
Because Monty Hall is inherently grounded, while Sleeping Beauty is a weird contrivance pretty much on purpose. Sleeping Beauty relies on a supposed perfect memory-erasing amnesia drug erasing one entire interview and only that one interview. It further relies on Beauty being unable to distinguish the passage of time at all, and even more confusingly we are including Beauty's answers across multiple days in our sample space! This is unintuitive. Our sample space to get 1/3 is: Beauty on Monday on Heads, Beauty on Monday on Tails, Beauty on Tuesday on Tails, yes? Most probability problems are not so casual about employing asymmetric tree diagrams across temporal positions, because the eminently natural assumption about the passage of time is that you were able to perceive it. The weird, nonexistent mind-altering drug breaks that intuition about the unbroken forward flow of time! An assumption we virtually never question in any other scenario.
So despite my best wishes I guess I'll take the bait. To be clear, I'm not so much trying to explain the halfer position as elucidating why I believe the whole debate to be kind of stupid and misguided, though I am quite sympathetic to your view.
Anyways, time flow. In other words, the halfer position rejects that it even makes sense to ask about Beauty on Tuesday, since "obviously" the sample space is only: Beauty on Monday with two possible coin flip results (i.e. guesses). The halfer position says in effect that it's impossible to consider two super-imposed Tails-guessing Beauties on both Monday and Tuesday at once. Or, phrased a different (and probably better) way, a Monday Beauty guessing tails is functionally indistinguishable from a Tuesday Beauty guessing tails, because the "divergence" in intent has already occurred! The only relevant guess is the coin.
The second illuminating follow-up question: What is our reward scheme? Do we reward Beauty for a correct answer every time she wakes up (and then steal it back when she sleeps and forgets, thus making any gain ephemeral; though optionally we may choose to sum all three of her choices for aggregate statistical reasons), or do we reward Beauty only after it's Wednesday? For the former, we are effectively rewarding each awakening, but for the latter we provoke a philosphical crisis. Is Tuesday Beauty really making a truly independent choice? Halfers might say no, of course not, "reality" already diverged. Thirders would say yes, of course, it's a new day so thus a new choice. Crisis aside, consider a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm not playing mind games, I'm choosing heads literally every time" - for a one-time Wednesday-only reward, she wins half the time. Can we truly treat a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm choosing Tails every time" differently? It depends on our reward scheme! In one setup it's clear this Tails-stubborn Beauty gets double winnings every Wednesday (because even though both awakenings gave the same answer, they were rewarded separately thus double dipping), while in the other she is no better off than the Heads-stubborn one (because the coin was, in fact, tails just half the time, and she's only rewarded at the end). Hopefully that teases apart why it matters.
But you see the issue here, previously obscured? Not only is this contrived, but we require some clarification here about definitions to deliver an answer. We could use a computer, but then we're merely revisiting the same problem with our programming as a design choice: when the coin comes up Tails, do Monday-Beauty and Tuesday-Beauty execute their decision-making code twice with independent randomness, or does Tuesday-Beauty simply output the duplicated cached result from Monday? We implicitly make a claim, one of the following:
- Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), so this is a new epistemic event with fresh uncertainty and new entropy. Effectively she makes a new, independent guess. The extra uncertainty might potentially be considered the self-doubt about where she is in the timeline.
- Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), but this is a stale re-run of Monday with no uncertainty, no new entropy, and no new information. Effectively she obviously makes the same guess. There is no extra uncertainty because she has an almost predestination view of fate.
This whole setup is odd, because typically in a probability problem, identical epistemic states with identical available information should have identical probability outputs/beliefs, right? Yet in one of these cases, we're saying the two events are separate because 'someone said so'. Or maybe more accurately, in one case we're talking about epistemic states of knowledge, and in the other we're talking about specific events. Scope is subtly different. The problem has laundered in a sneaking modeling choice without you realizing it. Your choice of model literally determines if additional randomness is injected into the system or not, and thus influences the long-run probability you will find. This is especially clear when you add simple rewards like I described.
But anyways real life does not contain weird situations like these reminiscent of quantum physics. Monty Hall can be modeled strictly mechanically, and in a loose sense so can Sleeping Beauty... but how you represent said model is not a settled question. Is the experiment truly "reset" when we move from Monday to Tuesday? Again that's really a purely philosophical question, not a mathematical one. The presence of a belief-having chooser like Beauty is required for us to even talk about "beliefs" and "rational bets" and all that stuff. This is the doubly case when it comes to time. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of statistics and probability: we cannot actually run perfectly authentic, true counterfactuals, because time runs in one direction. Just like science fiction can only theorize and imagine what would happen in multiverses or if we perfectly cloned a human mind, probability also struggles to perfectly map to reality and human perception because of the aforementioned triple concept divergence in what we mean when we say "probability".
Maybe I'm being too harsh on this thought experiment, but I have little patience for them when they so obviously diverge from reality. We shouldn't be surprised that setting up an unintuitive situation produces unintuitive answers.
I did the math about a year ago and guess what? At least if we're talking about amnesty creating eventual citizens who eventually vote and vote Democratic at disproportionate rates, the numbers simply don't work and would have had only a minor impact at best in turning California blue. So, I'm sorry if that's a long held belief of yours but it doesn't seem true.
It's probably more a mix of tech boom + urbanization + marginal changes in demographic makeup + a few more local concerns + national trends. It's worth noting how fast this was, though, and that makes me suspect the last two especially: +16 R for Reagan in the 1984 wave, to +3.5 R for Bush Sr 1988, to a total collapse to -13.5 (Ross Perot shenanigans though) as Clinton took the state for good in 1992 with about the same margin again in 1996. A bungled post-Reagan, post-amnesty GOP push for a 1994 anti-immigrant bill is often cited... but that post-dates the first massive swing against Bush and Republicans. So unless you mean that somehow that amnesty almost singlehandedly turned pre-existing Reagan fans against Bush Sr, I don't see it. California only went about 2 to 3 points more Democratic than expected (the 4-year swing as compared to national trends) in 1988, the closest election after the 1986 amnesty. Even if you think that "unique" delta is purely the result of amnesty, it's still only a drop in the pond compared the overall swing and certainly wasn't the sole difference even remotely. An easier holistic explanation is right there: Bush was an East Coast insider. And you probably had some early stirrings of social liberalism gaining ground. Looking again at the numbers, it seems to me that a mix of Bush Sr's weaknesses plus the Clinton era is more responsible than anything else (in 1996, actually, since Clinton did better than 1992 generally, you could actually characterize it as a small amount of backsliding, but 2000 seemed to cement the vote differential as noticeably Democratic).
I'm sure you could do more analysis with more local knowledge and county data, not just presidential numbers, but I'm pretty sure the explanatory power of the lazy equation above is pretty high, and doesn't leave much room for a uniquely amnesty blame-game.
Unavoidable long-term yes, but short and medium term?: Quite preventable. The US rolled over to China and allowed IP theft on industrial scale, strategic acquisitions of US and global companies in key industries, ignored blatant limitations on foreign companies within China, ignored massive targeted state subsidies, and failed to support manufacturing in other more friendly and allied low-labor-cost countries, all because US companies were convinced that they could double their profits by getting access to the Chinese market - which, and the real kicker of it all, obviously did not work in any way, shape, or form for anyone in the West, at least beyond a decade or two. Sadly nothing too new; I still regularly curse Nixon's name to this day over leaving us with the Taiwan shitstorm because he was too busy trying to reap short-term political benefit at home - sound familiar?
There's an alternate world where Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, etc. (possibly India but that's a different can of worms) all picked up significant amounts of manufacturing slack which we could play off of each other, and China's technological acceleration was delayed by a full additional decade (and thus also their military, political, and economic clout). China really backstabbed us when it came to the "promises" made on joining the WTO in the leadup to 2001, Bush should have taken action by the mid-2000s to give them a warning, and Obama shouldn't have taken so long to bring about the TPP (2016!) which ended up both shitty and even worse, sailing without us. Even worse, especially under Obama's watch, the forced technology transfer, ownership restrictions, and outright theft reached critical proportions with essentially zero real response. I personally think that will go down in history as one of the worst economic blunders of all time.
What hath this wrought? There's a strong chance we're war with China over Taiwan within two years after Trump leaves office, and if so we will lose. Badly. It won't even be all that close.
I think that's uncharitable. I lived in Oregon at the time, where I also grew up, and I remember quite a few (though definitely not a majority!) of leftists quite upset at the drone-strike era Patriot Act stuff only getting worse under Obama. The problem here is that in general, privacy-minded people are small minorities in both parties (there's pretty notably only a single Rand Paul in the Senate, for example). In fact leftists were the ones most loud and annoying about hating the TSA stuff, as a smaller example, and leftists also the ones feeling more warm towards Snowden even though it also happened on Obama's watch, but again libertarians are a weird cross-axis group (almost a horseshoe theory thing)
J Edgar Hoover era stuff also doesn't map neatly onto modern political orientations, so I don't want to overemphasize it in that sense, but it's nevertheless worth noting that in that era the leftists also were eventually targeted the most by his apparatus (and which was far, far worse than the kiddie shit everyone gets worked up about regarding the like, two lower level dudes in the Trump campaign getting wiretapped. And I mean for heaven's sakes Nixon had people literally break into the Democratic headquarters). So maybe my more broad point is that I'm often confused by people being so accusatory about anti-authoritarians being too loud or annoying...
...because virtually the entire history of the United States is one giant concern about authoritarianism! Think what you will about the modern No Kings rallies, but the idea is super-duper-mega-American. Modern people are often very surprised at how passionately Americans often felt about the issue. Even now-beloved people like Lincoln were very, very often accused or suspected of being tyrants in disguise.
In that sense, it feels like a partisan psy-op that so many people are convinced that it's purely a partisan TDS thing alone. It's not. Sure, I absolutely and completely agree that Biden and Harris over-milked it as a talking point, to the detriment of their own ideas for governance. There is an element of chicken and egg too (is Trump's far more extreme second term a counter-reaction to alleged Democratic misdeeds, or was this his true character all along that Democrats were warning about? Even granting that binary presentation of the question, causality is not so easy to tease out). Yet still, saying it's all bad faith is a severe misattribution error.
In other words, the majority of Congress has sided with the President against a minority of Congress in a common dispute
No. Actually, big no. Congressional inaction is not the same as congressional action. Votes are required for action to take place for a reason. A lack of official and formal votes cannot possibly be construed to actually be the will of Congress for what I hope should be obvious reasons. Congress' actions are affirmative only, by definition! A law or expression of will, once passed, should not and cannot be ignored. It must be actually repealed.
But at any rate this is moving the goalposts (freely forgiven because of OP's formulation of the question) because Trump has done more things against the explicit will of Congress and its explicitly granted power over spending than just the ICA episode. And before you point to the vague SC decision about it, this also didn't come even close to resolving the issue because it was loosely hand-woven over foreign-policy adjacent powers, which other illegal and unconstitutional acts do not concern.
Congress did not pass a budget
This is a bit weird overall and I'm not sure what to think. Congressional spending is, admittedly, often done in an infuriating pretzel-like twisty manner and so things aren't super duper clear cut in all cases. It's not totally clear what, if anything, can or should be done in the face of genuine inaction. I do tend to think that eventually and generally, absent any and all budget, the government should fully and completely shut down even if this results in critical services going undone as a matter of law if Congress truly does nothing to apportion funds, though, and that the President can't stop it even if like, pragmatically he probably could do something.
SCOTUS has helped this along
Some kind of SC reform is needed but it may need to take full amendment form for the deeper reforms. I personally believe that bureaucratically at least the SC's processes are dysfunctional. Their current pattern of handling things via incomplete orders, shadow dockets, being overly pedantic about standing, etc etc is bad.
have also declined to actually try and stop the R&D transfer or private donations to troops they refuse to allow to be paid
See above for my objection regarding lack of action not being at all equivalent to actual affirmative action by Congress. Most of your comments here are playing a political blame game, but that's not the question at hand here, it's more a general constitutional question, and so of only minimal relevance.
However. Admittedly it feels icky and gross and probably bad practice at a minimum to allow private donations to substantially prop up core government sovereign functions (and there is I believe a Constitutional argument that certain functions are not permitted to be fully privatized) but going further back in history I'm pretty sure similar-ish stuff has happened without too much fuss. In theory however the Appropriations Clause seems to suggest that there is some limit, though the contours are probably poorly understood on this issue. My opinion here also applies to the ballroom thing. (As as practical matter though, this is uncomfortably close to legalized bribery and so combined with a turbocharged presidential immunity, I find concerning, though I'm trying to keep things relatively nonpartisan on these questions)
In other words, the President applied a legal tariff, did not do an export tax, using trade authorities granted by Congress. Congress, in turn, has not passed a budget to incorporate this revenue,
I am not currently qualified to opine on if it's an illegal export tax. I will say this: Trump is stretching and pressing powers explicitly intended for emergency use into more "normal" tariffs. I think that's terrible precedent and likely illegal (but on normal, not constitutional, grounds - the distinction matters). To his credit, some of these tariffs seem to be directly connected to foreign policy and trade deals, so that offers him some leeway (i.e. they in many cases do not appear to be intended to be permanent policy). But that latter point is the rub, right? Trump is not allowed to set permanent tariffs. Whether Trump's actions constitute a violation of, say, the Nondelegation Doctrine I'm happy to leave to the courts. Yet again however it doesn't matter if Trump is more proximately responsible for raising the money... it's not his to spend!! Only Congress can, via official vote, decide where and when to spend the Government's money. Period. Trump does not get special benefit of the doubt here. He's got some minor latitude within existing structures and programs, but Presidents of both parties have been playing way too fast and loose with this. The government is NOT one enormous slush fund, nor could Congress make it perform that way even if they tried, they are not allowed.
Maybe the more informative question in all this is - how wide do you consider the Nondelegation Doctrine? And what do you think the whole check/balance behind giving Congress explicit power of the purse and to tax is even for? Reading between the lines you don't seem to think it's all that important.
I think even Republicans, if they were thinking more clearly, should have great cause for concern. As the supposed originalists, they should be extra aware of the original Constitution's ideas for how the branches' relations should be. And there are objectively several gigantic fractures in the original Constitutional checks-and-balances design (who you blame for this is a separate discussion). We have:
- Presidential legislation (increased direct-influence federal rule-making, executive order overreliance, manipulation and selective proposal of federal grants and funding to coerce local, state, and even private entities)
- Presidential power of the purse (unilateral rescissions, manipulation of budgetary estimation, and attempts to shutter entire Congressionally-mandated departments)
- Directly bypassing and undermining Constitutionally-mandated requirements for Senate-confirmed Cabinet (and similar) leadership (via "acting" heads sometimes even appointed unilaterally from outside the organization and often in place for very extended periods of time, plus other runarounds, and certainly not much "advice and consent")
- Substantially defying Congressional power over declarations of war (provoking wars, unilateral first strike decisions, and even an AUMF being used for a literal and actual war)
- Constitutional amendments, which virtually everyone seems to agree are needed and were explicitly designed to be possible to fix problems in the core design (or new situations meriting new solutions), are not forthcoming nor seem practical to implement
- Diminished prosecutorial discretion and increased direct political influence on law enforcement (I don't believe there is true equivalence here but both sides at least facially agree this is strongly weakened)
- Almost forgot, the Senate is supposed to ratify (or reject!) major foreign policy treaties. This is, quite frankly, no longer done almost at all. There are massive and impactful agreements regularly made by Presidents with zero Congressional input or say.
Again, these are not really partisan spin-type allegations, they are very strongly rooted in fact. I can't emphasize enough that all of those problems are fundamental and direct threats to the checks and balances system. There's also some federal-vs-state stuff too but I tend to view that as less important.
Also, you have varying degrees of extra-Constitutional but still foundational stuff like:
- Weakened military-political noninterference, for example as argued here that the grand bargain in America has been that "the military agrees not to insert itself into (internal) politics broadly construed and in exchange the civilian authorities agree not to use the military in internal politics and finally in turn the military occupies an elevated place of trust in the citizenry."
- Durable and influential political parties, infamously
- Compromise is seen as weakness and is increasingly rare despite playing a major role in historical precedent (although historians don't agree on whether those major compromises were all good)
- Gerrymandering's disproportionate impact on election dynamics
- Litigation and obligation and force as regular checks w/r/t the judiciary, rather than more holistic/informal/mutually respectful understandings
- Judiciary checks expected to be quick, wide-ranging, high-volume, and other non-ideal expectations or flaws and disagreements about their role
- I would include abuse of the pardon power here, but I acknowledge that considering this a broken piece might be a minority view
- Clashes over the timing of Supreme Court nominations (e.g. Merrick Garland) and also other especially-judicial nominations (Congress here is possibly the breaker of this check/balance)
- Whether Congress is allowed to set up presidential-influence resistant mechanisms like the Fed
I'm still a believer in the system, but... shit's bad. That's not an exaggeration. While political polarization is overblown (historically), the checks and balances are I believe in a worse state than they have ever been in the entire history of the state. I do fear for an American Empire era. Not in the next 10 years probably, but in the next 30, absolutely. Weirdly, I actually kind of think that making Senators directly elected (done via amendment) might have been a mistake, that the original idea of making them appointed by legislatures was more conducive to the role they were expected to play.
Again, let's step back for a moment: that's SEVEN major failures of critical pillars of the three-branch system to sustain itself properly (as originally envisioned). That's very concerning. Only so many checks and balances can be nullified before the system functionally collapses. (In fact, an argument could actually be made that Congress allowing too much federal rule-making many decades ago has created a vicious downward spiral as the responsibilities became increasingly easy to evade). This is, again, just simple facts and logic so to speak.
Now, to your original point, does dysfunction in one place justify dysfunction in another? I say no, two wrongs don't make a right. IF, and that's a big IF, major and fundamental stuff is going undone due to failings of Congress, I think the President is probably allowed some latitude. But that in my view is not broadly the case here, not now and not historically either. Executive rule-making infringing on legislative turf, the whole rescission stuff, presidential military encroachment, at least all of those have a long history of occurring independently even when Congress isn't dropping the ball. Like, the President is probably within his rights to move money around to pay the troops in a government shutdown like this, even if I don't like it. But the President is NOT allowed to deliberately, for example, decline to nominate someone to a Cabinet-level position on purpose because he prefers the current non-confirmed dude, as he recently did. I'm not quite sure what the ideal remedy for that failure is, if any, but it IS still a failure.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9d ago
That's slightly unfair - they've also done things like tweak fine tuning and post training so that ambiguity isn't penalized so much, and also there's some smaller advancements with the mathematical underpinnings regarding what to do in certain "low-confidence" scenarios, for lack of a better concise descriptor. That means that even some no-tool-use models are also moderately better at hallucination resistance, though it's obviously very far from a solved problem (the most obvious confabulations however usually aren't happening anymore, unless you're a shit model like Grok prioritizing different things like Grok)
I hope you knew what you were getting into bringing up Sleeping Beauty, haha. I have a degree in statistics (which doesn't necessarily grant me as much insight into probability theory as you might imagine) but I usually avoid getting into the weeds by simply stating that the question: "What does probability mean in real life?" is NOT a settled question, at all. You cannot escape bringing in philosophy. I recommend this Stanford encyclopedic entry for a pretty nice and thorough treatment/overview of some of the difficulties involved in what initially seems to be a simple word.
Broadly speaking, there are arguably three main concepts of probability:
- An epistemological concept, which is meant to measure objective evidential support relations. For example, “in light of the relevant seismological and geological data, California will probably experience a major earthquake this decade”.
- The concept of an agent’s degree of confidence, a graded belief. For example, “I am not sure that it will rain in Canberra this week, but it probably will.”
- A physical concept that applies to various systems in the world, independently of what anyone thinks. For example, “a particular radium atom will probably decay within 10,000 years”.
Some philosophers will insist that not all of these concepts are intelligible; some will insist that one of them is basic, and that the others are reducible to it. Moreover, the boundaries between these concepts are somewhat permeable. After all, ‘degree of confidence’ is itself an epistemological concept, and as we will see, it is thought to be rationally constrained both by evidential support relations and by attitudes to physical probabilities in the world. And there are intramural disputes within the camps supporting each of these concepts, as we will also see. Be that as it may, it will be useful to keep these concepts in mind. Sections 3.1 and 3.2 discuss analyses of concept (1), "classical" and "logical/evidential probability"; 3.3 discusses analyses of concept (2), "subjective probability"; 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 discuss three analyses of concept (3), "frequentist", "propensity", and "best-system" interpretations.
Put more simply, it's not fair to imply that there is a mathematically "correct" interpretation of probability. This is wrong. In fact you can axiomatize something mathematically in several different ways while still retaining most if not all desirable math traits we want out of "probability" (see link), even if many end up being fairly similar... with that said, however, you are correct as far as I'm aware that Sleeping Beauty is better seen as a semantic or definitional disagreement than a mathematical one per se. Even there, though, you go too far. You can make the math satisfy your basic probability axioms of your choice, whether you're a halfer or thirder alike, once you've defined a sample space (and thus what counts as a "trial") and any other relevant definitions have been clarified (especially clarifying what, precisely, is being conditioned on!!). In short, no experts consulted are making math mistakes, they merely are speaking in scissor statements, as we might say around here.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9d ago
Polarizing and niche appeal people like Musk often doom their own projects to niche appeal by the very fact of being involved, for one. Nearly any other mainstream tech-famous figure would have far more cachet right away, or even a determined but unknown media whore. This matters not just for getting users to the site and retaining them (obviously important - see the failure of Truth Social), but also because at the current state of AI to do this you functionally need human volunteers to supervise said AI, and so you want to cast that net more widely. You want curious and motivated people, not tech castoffs with an axe to grind against the “establishment”. Making an encyclopedia is foundationally an establishment thing to do anyways, the ideas are not very nicely compatible. Wikipedia’s faults are in execution, not a flaw in the core mission or even necessarily in its processes. One reason why all challengers have failed was attempting to reject that - more similar projects have their oxygen stolen by the more mature free product, but that’s obviously not a concern for an AI encyclopedia which is a novelty in and of itself, and at least theoretically could offer some things Wikipedia cannot.
And don’t get me wrong, given the recent history of Grok models, not only would Grok need a lot of hand holding, it’s quite possible even with said help it would be flatly incapable of obtaining an acceptable final product. Some smart engineering might allow current gen models to achieve some sort of success, but that’s again something where the engineering is often the point, not the final output. As an example, it would be genuinely interesting to see if a horde of slightly differently tuned and varied models are able to produce an emergent AI “wisdom of the crowds” equivalent, or would get stuck in certain fail states. Musk gets this paradigm all wrong, because he is plainly treating the project as both advertising for his specific shitty model, as well as a partisan vehicle to launder his sociopolitical complaints into greater coherence or acceptability. These are not sustainable directions on multiple fronts.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10d ago
Something like Grokipedia is a good and valuable idea, even if poorly monetizable and requiring a lot more money and effort than was spent here. In fact setting up agentic loops to produce Wikipedia would be a fascinating and useful study and playground for AI models.
Musk is the wrong one to do this and Grok is the wrong tool for the job besides.
However, I expect something like it to eventually exist.
“Very few other reasons” is also not a good standard for regular use of deadly force. If you’re not actively at war, which we are not (certain Mexican cartels are functionally at war with the Mexican military but not our own), then if not a beyond reasonable doubt standard, you need to be in that similar ballpark. That innocent reasons are unlikely does not make them impossible.
The entire point of having a different standard for actual war is that different standards inherently apply. But philosophically and legally, using wartime standards because you’ve used some kind of indirect killing logic is a terrible, terrible precedent. Actual terror groups have histories of directly and intentionally killing Americans, and so there is legally and philosophically more latitude. Drug cartels sell drugs to other people, who sell those drugs to Americans, who occasionally misuse the drugs and kill themselves (which the cartels don’t even want to happen because it deprives them of ongoing revenue)*. That’s… morally still somewhat direct, but the famously law is about far more than just morality. Doubly so when it comes to lethal force, something which definitionally is irreversible in multiple ways. Which, weirdly, is under appreciated in our society today.
(*Vertical integration among cartels varies widely and intentionality can vary, so there’s a theoretical maximalist case where a completely vertically integrated cartel deliberately laces their drugs with lethal doses and use false marketing to directly sell them to Americans only, but that’s not even something the Trump admin has bothered to argue and is highly implausible to boot).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10d ago
I see two main issues. One, is that actually a fair characterization of all SYG laws, that they only narrowly remove avoidance? I remember seeing it strongly argued that #1 was often directly undermined or made irrelevant by such laws, though I’m not sure about the truth of that. Related, and you see this a bit in the thread, is that SYG sort of “begs the question” in a sense where the very presence of a gun re-interprets a fight as lethal disfavorably to a would be assailant quite often. I realize sympathy for assailants is low around here, but common law does usually support the idea that e.g. a fistfight or an unarmed mugging is usually not a fight to the death (of course intentionality matters). The presence of a gun obviously changes the calculus. But who assumes this extra risk, is the operative question? I appreciate what SYG laws are trying to do but I do wonder if the matter is quite as clear cut as you say. As an example, should a conscious decision to bring a gun to an otherwise nonlethal dispute have any bearing on the legal responsibility, and do SYG laws impact that kind of finding?
First of all, I get you on at least some level. The personal side of me notices that there have been times even within the last few years where quite literally I am only alive because I didn't want to inflict suffering on my family and friends. And honestly I think that's a totally fine and complete reason to keep existing. I'm not sure your exact situation, but hopefully something similar applies.
The religious/more generalized-spiritual side of me says that you should spend some time helping others if you have nothing to be thankful for. Literally and physically volunteer. Despite its spiritual roots, I'm pretty sure this is a quite practical suggestion as well. Pessimistically, say we agree with your claim that you enjoy quite literally nothing and are quite literally miserable 24/7... you can still find a degree of purpose by helping others, which is real.
(On that note, I'd suggest - though I haven't personally read yet - Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which might jive with your situation a bit.)
The heartless statistics side of me says that regular exercise is quite literally just as if not more effective than meds or therapy, so... do that. Stupid, annoying, but clearly works. It's almost literally the most durable scientific finding in all of depression research, despite being one of the hardest to do for obvious reasons (it may be useful to recruit someone to bully you into it, or do it with you - be vulnerable and ask). The statistics of these kinds of states are weird - for example, I intellectually know, it's an established fact, that if I don't get enough sleep, I get extremely depressed at night before bed. That knowledge doesn't quite help in that actual moment, not a ton, but that does slightly help me frame what's "real" properly.
The more neuroscience/quirky side of me suggests that you break out of mental ruts in a deliberate way. For example, I was also recently recommended, of all things, a book called Impro, a set of essays about improv, but as a life-outlook kind of book. One exercise therein is silly but I do believe it "works": Simply spend a few minutes walking around the room and shouting out loud the wrong names for things. Allegedly, this can help you experience the world more vividly for a few moments. I'm not sure that particular exercise is of value to you, but the general concept of "do something deliberately weird or crazy" might be. Frame things differently, and be a little extreme about it. How this might manifest for you? Do something extremely quirky or way outside the norm as a birthday activity. Show up at a local coffee shop and start complimenting strangers. Go to the bank, withdraw a ton of single dollar bills, and give them away to people. Dress up for some banal errands. That kind of thing.
More options
Context Copy link