MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16hr ago
The UK and US have announced a trade deal.
Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):
- US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
- Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
- British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
- UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
- Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
- The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
- The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
- Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).
Initial thoughts:
- This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
- This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
- This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
- The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
- The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.
Thoughts on the politics:
- The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
- Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
- Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
- The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
- The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
- Farage hasn't spoken yet.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
I think this is a case where there is a lot of mutual incomprehension between Americans and Europeans due to different historical mythologies reflecting different histories.
In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution*, liberty is secured by the ability of the nation-in-arms to check the power of the armed forces of the democratic state. In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the French Revolution, liberty is secured by the fact that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state**. Finland (alongside Switzerland) is one of the few European countries where that is still a realistic statement of how the armed forces work. Contra Nybbler downthread, if you accept that worldview then the Finnish government didn't corruptly turn on its own people in order to appease the Soviets - the Finnish government and people surrendered to the Soviets after losing the Continuation War.
* The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop on what we (wrongly) saw as the least important front of a three-continent mostly-naval war against France. This isn't quite true, but it is a lot closer to the truth than "Colonial militias were able to take down the British Empire by virtue of local knowledge and superior woodcraft."
** It wasn't
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
As a non-American familiar with American history, I am inclined to agree with this take.
Even if you don't think that the Civil War was caused by slavery, it is very obvious from soldiers' accounts that the necessary hatred for Americans to cheerfully put themselves through four years of danger and material deprivation for the primary purpose of shooting other Americans had a lot to do with slavery. And of course most of the pre-Civil War political violence was explicitly about slavery.
And then post Civil War you still see ongoing white-on-white political violence driven by the Negro Question (the Lincoln assassination, Reconstruction and the 1st Klan, Redemption and the Red Shirts etc.) There is a lull after the anti-racist side gives up and cuts a deal to tolerate Jim Crow, but the Civil Rights Movement sees more than a little actual white-on-white political violence, and a lot of credible threats which end up getting walked back when it becomes clear that the Feds are not backing down. The fact that the Kennedy assassination turned out to have nothing to do with race surprised Americans so much that you seem to have had a collective head explosion.
In our generation, the George Floyd et al riots seem to involve a lot of white-on-white political violence nominally driven by concern for blacks. Rittenhouse vs the idiots is just the specific case that got put under a microscope.
I'm not aware of any other issue where white Americans are willing to kill each other and think they are serving the common good by doing so.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I've only came across Garamond in the context of soulless corporate drudgery (specifically, it was the official serif font of the old Shell before it got caught in a reserves mis-representation scandal in 2004 and was forced to become a more normal company).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Personally I think the question of what the purpose of rationalism is has been answered: it was to create the AI safety movement.
This was never a question - Yudkowsky set up the so-called rationalist community with the explicit purpose of creating a future generation of AI safety researchers. Or rather AI researchers more generally, because at the point when he did it (LessWrong was founded in 2009) AlphaGo was still years away, academic AI (both the GOFAI and neural nets factions) was in a long-term rut, and the state of the art was machine learning algorithms for recommending viral content. As of 2009, Yudkowsky thought that the problem was "build an aligned AI slowly and secretly" because nobody else was doing anything he expected to lead to working AI.
My assumption is that an underrated source of weirdness in the rationalists community is that the first thing Yudkowsky did to promote this community was to write a viral Harry Potter fanfic, meaning that the 2nd generation of rationalists (after the Overcoming Bias readers) were pulled in from Harry Potter fandom, bringing everything wrong with that community into "Rationalism".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I don't think that Joseph Smith had access to Orthodox Judaism as a model. Anti-anti-Catholicism is clearly a major motivation for Mormonism - Joseph Smith's theology pushes back against the Protestant position on at least two big issues where the Protestantism of his day was over-emphasising their theological differences from Catholicism at the expense of shared Christianity (sacramentally ordained priesthood and total depravity/justification by faith alone). But I think the similarities between LDS and Catholic practice are convergent evolution of a functional hierarchical Church. (In particular, the different relationship between ordained ministry and hierarchy in the two Churches is such that theologically the hierarchy works very differently).
The other major influence on the development of LDS theology is Freemasonry. Joseph Smith came from a Masonic family and most of the early Mormon leaders were initiated as Masons in Illinois before the Church migrated to Utah. The Masonic symbols on the garments and the Masonic elements of the Temple Endowment ceremony are kind of obvious. The official position of the LDS hierarchy was that both organisations have privileged access to secrets that originated in Solomon's Temple before the death of Hiram Abiff, and the shared symbolism reflects this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Fact 6 is slightly confusing here. The apostles claimed to have seen a physical Jesus in his actual, resurrected body. Paul's vision of Jesus happened long after Ascension Day and was understood as a vision of someone was not currently living in a physical body - I don't see why it is evidence for a resurrection at all.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.
There are three basic relationship scripts seen in primates (and they cover 90+% of non-primate vertebrate species as well): monogamy, harem-holding polygyny, and promiscuity*. Humans appear to have the required instincts to do all three, although monogamy appears to produce the best social outcomes. Most arrangements that exist under the umbrella of "polyamory" seem to be minor variations on one of the three. Most of the Bay Area rationalist polyamorists are in reproductively monogamous primary relationships, so their form of polyamory is basically monogamy with tolerated cheating. There is clearly a lot of "it's not a harem if the women are bi, it's a polycule" going on within polyamory, although the poly community tries to stigmatise it. But the forms of polyamory which are highest status within the community are things like "relationship anarchy" where you somehow manage to sign a lease with a partner while maintaining the sexual norms of promiscuity.
* Note that these are not particularly tied to the patriarchy/matriarchy axis. Monogamous animals are usually egalitarian, but patriarchal polygyny (gorillas, lions), matriarchal polygyny (peacoks), patriarchal promiscuity (chimps) and matriarchal promiscuity (bonobos, elephants) are all common.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
"I am the only guy who can deal with Trump", confidently stated, just swung the Canadian election
Was the real message "I am the only guy who can deal with Trump" or was it more like "I am the only guy who can be trusted to want to deal with Trump"? I don't think Canadians thought Poilievre was weak and shit - I think they thought he was fundamentally sympathetic to someone who had suddenly become the enemy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
There are two theories here. One is that the US has imposed restrictive rules of engagement on Ukraine's use of US-provided weapons (and possibly more broadly as an unofficial condition of continued support) and could unrestrict them - the theory here is that Russian logistics are sufficiently shaky enough that enough missile strikes on supply lines could collapse the army in Ukraine. Personally I don't find this theory plausible - officially the Blinken rules were cancelled by Biden during the lame duck period, and Ukraine's attacks on Russian territory seem to be capability-limited.
The other is that Russia know they have no path to victory with continued US support for Ukraine and Putin's plan is basically to wait out Trump's limited patience with Zelensky. In this scenario Russia will come to the negotiating table once it is sufficiently clear that Trump is not in fact about to come out as the Putin ally that TDS-sufferers think he is. I can't evaluate the plausibility of this theory because of the fog of war.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I don't think this is true - there seems to be a 20%ish vote for right-populists everywhere the electoral system permits it.
The problem is more simple - Trump is anti-Canadian, or at least was playing anti-Canadian during Q1 2025. If you were a blood-and-soil Canadian patriot, you would be anti-Trump because Trump is hurting Canadians with tariffs and does not appear to respect Canadian sovereignty. Right populists from different countries are only allied if their countries are committed to respecting each other's sovereignty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The rightful caliph has spoken on this matter. Hear ye, people, and be enlightened.
The big picture is similar to @Throwaway05, although Scott's client base are apparently more likely to have a problem with video game addiction than with sleep apnea, given Scott's list of "things other than insomnia that prevent sleep". There are two big differences:
- Scott explicitly calls out "my natural circadian rhythm doesn't match my lifestyle" as a case where lifestyle interventions other than the obvious one don't work, so if you can't change you lifestyle to match your circadian rhythm you should go straight to melatonin.
- Scott promotes CBT-i apps as a good way of doing CBT-i. One for the medico-commies - the best CBT-i apps (apart from ludicrously expensive prescription-only ones) were developed by the VA, and are free to users as a result.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I don't actually know if it is true that right-populism naturally throws up politicians of base character, or whether Trump and Johnson are just highly salient bad examples. Farage seems marginally more honest than the average politician (a low bar, but one Trump and Johnson profoundly fail to clear). Marine le Pen clears the even lower bar of being more honest than the average French politician. Meloni clears the lower still bar of being more honest than the average Italian politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I learned about the idea from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.
I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.
*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.
** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life
Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Mars' gravity well is shallow enough that you can build a space elevator with present-day materials technology, which means that to a civilisation capable of colonising Mars getting out of the gravity well is cheap.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.
Biology is somewhat softer than physics, but not enough that the totalitarian system that did Lysenkoism or lied about the death of Laika couldn't have done Arische Physik if it wanted to. The CPSU leadership made a deliberate decision to give physicists in general, and nuclear physicists in particular, a level of intellectual freedom it denied to everyone else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
but was prevented from cutting the welfare-warfare state
Nice use of the passive voice here. Reagan explicitly supported expanding the warfare state, and his big idea on the welfare state side was that free market policies would allow the economy to outgrow the cost of an aging population. Reagan's White House economic team were believers in starving the beast and the two-Santa theory - not in cutting spending themselves.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.
I don't know enough about Reagan but Thatcher was very cautious and targetted in her attacks on institutions. In her first term she identified a specific enemy (unions, particularly blue-collar unions in state-owned companies) and spent several years planning and executing the attack on them before she went after anything else. She went after other institutions in the same methodical way later, but there was never a purge of the civil service and the purge of middle management in the newly-privatised industries took place over about a decade post-privatisation.
MAGA lump all the PMC-led institutions together, declare war on the whole blob, and demand rapid shock-and-awe attacks on all fronts simultaneously. (Trump responds, but mostly with kayfabe - you don't actually bring the Deep State to heel by cutting USAID's Politico Pro subscriptions). We will see how effective this is, but I wouldn't bet on it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for the New Economic Geography, which includes an agglomeration model where industrial policy can have a long-term benefit even if markets are efficient. And that industrial policy could use targeted tariffs as a tool. But Krugman the political commentator has consistently said (ever since he became a Famous Economist whose political views are taken seriously - not just since Trump started supporting tariffs) that he doesn't think that countries at the technological frontier can make industrial policy work in practice. He supported NAFTA and the WTO when those were live political issues.
Krugman the economics populariser put a lot of effort into debunking the macroeconomic case for broad-based tariffs. About a third of his Slate columns were attacking the idea that imports destroy jobs. And he said things about current and capital account imbalances (the two are opposite sides of the same accounting identity) are broadly that bilateral imbalances are harmless, and that overall imbalances can be good or bad, are always dangerous, and that the right tool to control them is capital controls and not tariffs.
It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy). My personal guess is that there isn't a policy at all, just vibes. But the arguments Navarro is making for the tariffs are macroeconomic, and the details of the tariffs we got are consistent with the goal being macroeconomic rather than industrial policy. So Krugman opposing these tariffs is entirely consistent with what he has been saying since the 1990's.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Scott has been a de facto Democratic partisan ever since Trump walked down the escalator - he thinks that the badness of the Orange Man is comfortably the most important issue out there right now. You don't need to be a leftie to think that - you just need to think that there is a character-based filter for high public office, and that Trump fails to meet it. He doesn't have TDS - he is able to distinguish between true and false negative statements about Trump (see You are Still Crying Wolf).
See my most-updooted post about Boris Johnson for a worked example of how character can derail an administration and harm the country in a way which doesn't depend on conventional partisan political views.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
I'm quibbling now given that you are right on the Barbary war and opening of Japan, but the Union blockade of the Confederacy was not a blue-water operation and it isn't clear if the Civil War era ironclads were blue-water capable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
If you mean the German National-Socialist party, calling them "the right" was a propaganda trick in 1930s and will remain so in 2030s.
The German right (in particular the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, Papen's right-wing faction of Zentrum and the clique of conservative aristocrats around Hindenburg) were broadly supportive of the NSDAP and actively enabled Hitler's rise to power. The German left (in particular the SDP) opposed it. I'm happy to admit that the relationship between the NSDAP and the KPD was more complex. But I think "the Nazis were right-wing" had a clear meaning in the context of 1930's Germany and that meaning is obviously correct given who was on which side. If you think you understand the politics of the NSDAP better than the German politicians of its time, then you need a better argument than "there is an S in NSDAP."
Mentioning them in the broader political context as the valid definition of the whole term
My position is that the CDU (and CSU in Bavaria) is "the right" in 21st century Germany. You disagree, and argue that "the right" should correctly refer to some other political tradition which rejects the CDU from a further-right perspective. The reason why no such political tradition has existed in Germany since 1945 is that "the right" in your sense discredited itself by being either proud supporters of or useful idiots for Hitler, and thus contributing to the utter ruination of Germany. It wasn't just Nazism that discredited itself in this way - it was the broader illiberal right including the DNVP, the Chamberlain-Halifax wing of the British Conservative party, throne-and-altar conservatives in Catholic Europe, and the militaristic conservatism of Quisling and Petain.
it certainly sounds like you're calling me a Nazi
I'm not calling you a Nazi - just as I wouldn't call Papen and Hugenberg Nazis, because they weren't. But they both did jail time after WW2 for collaborating with Nazis. I think that you are defining "the right" in a way which means anyone who is a reliable ally against Nazis doesn't qualify. I note that you explicitly endorsed the AfD, a group that was kicked out of the right-populist ID group in the European Parliament after its lead candidate defended the role of the SS in WW2, as an example of what you consider "the right". I think the AfD is lousy with Nazis (it isn't a Nazi party per se), and I think that someone who supports the AfD is sufficiently comfortable working with Nazis that they fall into the broad category of "right-wingers whose approach to politics should have been discredited by events leading up to 1945."
I never mentioned Farage (for the simple reason that his political power right now is microscopic, 4 seats out of 650?)
The proposition we were arguing about is "the right is over". Farage doesn't have power right now, but nobody paying attention to British politics thinks that Reform UK is "over". If you say that "the right is over" in the UK, you are implying that Reform UK isn't right-wing enough for you.
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