VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11hr ago
Doesn't this describe a fair amount of "gang violence"? We generally (for worse, IMO) look the other way about that, through some combination of what you described and ignoring it for political reasons, be it "we don't care about [redacted]" or "it'd have a disparate impact to prosecute those crimes".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16hr ago
This why I have a protocol when encountering an 'IRL' problem: de-escalate and remove-oneself from the situation. This will usually keep you safe.
I think this is true at the individual scale, but, for various reasons, in aggregate results in substantive loss of territory that seems worth noting. This can take the form of "When we had a kid, we moved out of San Francisco because the streets didn't feel safe for a toddler" to "Nobody goes to the park anymore because gangs aggressively harass anyone else trying to use it". Sure, de-escalation is a good idea, but rolling over at every perceived threat cedes the commons to wannabe tyrants: people should be able to go to the park, or walk down the street with their kids.
That said, it'd be better if that level of enforcement of the social contract weren't left to the whims of private parties. That is notionally part of why we employ police.
There is probably an interesting observation here somewhere on the difference in social contracts between Tokyo (or Paris, Berlin, or London circa 2005, maybe?) and San Francisco or Portland.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Doesn't Bitcoin suffer from the same sort of limits here that other decentralized protocols do, though? I'm not particularly aware of the link layer details, but mining requires a relatively consistent link (not high bandwidth, but minimal latency) to discover blocks mined by others. And issuing a transaction requires getting that data to enough of the miners to get it into a block. Offhand I'm not sure if both of these operations are generally "decentralized" today like DHT torrent links, and how robust those are --- it's been a while since I looked, but I think "absolutely distributed" is still an open research topic.
I will concede that's probably hard to block absolutely, but a sufficiently advanced adversary could at least make using it more painful.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I figured the worst 30 seconds would get prominently featured in attack ads targeting federal workers, especially essential ones. "This is what [your incumbent] was doing while trying to delay your paychecks" would seem pretty effective: IIRC one (blue) federal union's leadership has already started complaining.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Arguably, the huge increase in the standard deduction is the biggest simplification of the tax code since Reagan. After the 2018 (Trump administration) changes there, the number of filings taking the standard deduction went up from 70 to 90 percent.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.
One of my favorite random facts is that after Shelley wrote the poem, the mummy of Ramses II (in Greek, Ozymandias) was discovered and is currently in a museum in Cairo.
Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.
Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.
Certainly of a lot of voters. But some countries run on intentionally-devalued currencies --- China has been accused of this before. It doesn't drastically change the balance of internal trade, but makes your products more competitive globally for export, presumably allowing investment at scale for a longer-term payoff. The pluses of a valuable currency only show up if you're buying global commodities (oil prices), imported luxury goods, or taking international vacations (which is favorable only to the monied fraction that is going on those vacations). It need not directly hit anything valued in terms of "hours of domestic labor", like construction.
ETA: you're probably right about USB cables, but I'm not convinced about phones and computers, which are mostly automated production lines.
This entire shutdown is in the court of like 8 Democrats in the Senate.
I'm modestly surprised the Republicans haven't pressed them to give a standing filibuster. I guess it would give them a pulpit to speak, but it also has the optics of "we're trying to reopen the government and they're standing up there reading children's books" (Ted Cruz once read Green Eggs and Ham during one), or even just rambling poorly at 3:00AM while the majority of the Senate is ready to end the shutdown (and go to bed).
But maybe there is a strategic reason to not do so. Or a long-standing gentleman's agreement not to.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
and uncontroversially illegal unless Trump is working within authority delegated by Congress
I think to hear the administration tell it, Congress has: there are various laws on the books (for decades, in most cases) that allow the president to set tariffs for "national security" (that has never been a loophole before /s), negotiating trade policy, against countries that discriminate against US trade, and for generic "emergency" purposes (also a common loophole).
I'm not going to completely side with the administration here, but I don't think the claim that Congress hasn't at least intended to grant the authority is questionable (and I'm not going to take a side on whether Congress should have done this here). The delegation questions are interesting, but I don't expect a massive judicial rollback of "emergency" powers as the most likely outcome: I think the idea of giving the president this authority wasn't really questioned, and previous presidents have used them without as much controversy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation.
Joey Chestnut has entered the chat. Although he was allowed back into the championship (and won) this year.
Mostly a funny anecdote: I don't follow the competition generally.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think that's true in the short term, but children are also, as much as I dislike the phrase, "an investment in the future": if we decide to stop having kids (experiment ongoing in South Korea, among others), we can save so much money in childhood education and improve industrial output. Surely this won't have any consequences on a longer time horizon. /s
I'm not sure how I'd recommend aligning the incentives more broadly, though.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
perhaps also shortsighted that the writers of the 22nd amendment
Honestly I think their biggest sin was writing in the passive voice. The amendment text is rather unclear as to who is empowered to keep such a person from becoming elected by the electoral college. To be fair, it's a bit of a problem with the qualifications listed in the original text too: SCOTUS had to weigh in on whether each of the states got to decide that independently (apparently not, at least for those details). It's unclear what is supposed to happen if some state decides to put him on the top of the ballot (I suspect SCOTUS would weigh in, but I don't know what they'd decide), the voters choose him, and the electoral college convenes to elect him.
This would all be much clearer if it included something like the 18th's "The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." And if such legislation had been drafted and passed, I suppose. Then we'd get an answer to "which birth certificate forms can [state A] expect to certify that a candidate was born a citizen in [state B]?" (or even the John McCain case) and similar seemingly-trivial-but-devil-in-the-details questions like "Are you sure this is the same Donald J. Trump born in 1946 that was president previously?".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term.
I've occasionally mused that we should have a separate GDP term that captures "investment into The Future (tm)", specifically with an eye to things like capital investments that are net efficiency improvements. Something like "how much discretionary spending are spending above and beyond the cost of keeping the economy going?" But I think as a measure it's poorly-defined because "The Future" isn't necessarily something we all agree upon: is California's meandering, super-expensive high-speed rail project such a capital investment? I think it's easier to defend that (most) healthcare spending isn't a long-term investment because in many cases it's just fixing something that maybe didn't need to be broken: in an ideal world (let's assume Fully Automated Gay Space Communism, but that's probably a less-universal ideal than when Star Trek TNG was still on the air) we'd have relatively few doctors because people wouldn't get injured, at least as often.
But it's a hard metric to fully define. I'd be interested in reading more if any economists are looking this direction.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I'm curious what you'd peg as the "Golden Age" here, because complaints about the Internet going downhill have been evergreen since the endless September of 1994 began.
I'm not sure where I'd put the peak generally: in a few ways it's actually better than back then, if you're looking for scientific papers (open access at least exists as a concept) or niche hobby groups. The small-town "trust" feel does seem gone --- that analogy aligns with my "closing of the Western Cyber Frontier" narrative I've wanted to try putting to long-form words some time.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Will it be Obama or Trump?
Why not both? It seems boomerlibs do blame everything on Reagan, but boomercons like to blame Carter and/or "the hippies" similarly ("JFK started the closings of asylums, and the ACLU was for it"). Two screens and all that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I think it loosely has an assumed connotation of "generally agreed upon", even if the word doesn't directly imply that.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
And people are still making JD Vance couch jokes referencing a completely fake quote from his book. Many of those same fine folks were concerned about "misinformation" within the last few years.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda.
Is there someone interested in a steelman of ruling Citizens United in the opposite direction? The initial oral argument featured a claim that federal election law gave the government the authority to literally ban books. A redux argument in that case rather memorably featured Solicitor General Kagan (now a SCOTUS Justice) had the following dialog (PDF warning):
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: But we don't put our -- we don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats; and if you say that you are not going to apply it to a book, what about a pamphlet?
GENERAL KAGAN: I think a -- a pamphlet would be different. A pamphlet is pretty classic electioneering, so there is no attempt to say that 441 b only applies to video and not to print. It does --
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, what if the particular -- what if the particular movie involved here had not been distributed by Video on Demand? Suppose that people could view it for free on Netflix over the internet? Suppose that free DVDs were passed out. Suppose people could attend the movie for free in a movie theater; suppose the exact text of this was distributed in a printed form. In light of your retraction, I have no idea where the government would draw the line with respect to the medium that could be prohibited.
GENERAL KAGAN: Well, none of those things, again, are covered.
JUSTICE ALITO: No, but could they? Which of them could and which could not? I understand you to say books could not.
GENERAL KAGAN: Yes, I think what you -- what we're saying is that there has never been an enforcement action for books. Nobody has ever suggested -- nobody in Congress, nobody in the administrative apparatus has ever suggested that books pose any kind of corruption problem, so I think that there would be a good as-applied challenge with respect to that.
JUSTICE SCALIA: So you're -- you are a lawyer advising somebody who is about to come out with a book and you say don't worry, the FEC has never tried to send somebody to prison for this. This statute covers it, but don't worry, the FEC has never done it. Is that going to comfort your client? I don't think so.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: But this -- this statute doesn't cover. It doesn't cover books.
GENERAL KAGAN: No, no, that's exactly right. The only statute that is involved in this case does not cover books. So 441b which --
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Does cover books.
GENERAL KAGAN: -- which does cover books, except that I have just said that there would be a good as-applied challenge and that there has been no administrative practice of ever applying it to the books. And also only applies to express advocacy, right? 203 has -- is -- is -- has a broader category of the functional equivalent of express advocacy, but 441b is only express advocacy, which is a part of the reason why it has never applied to a book. One cannot imagine very many books that would meet the definition of express advocacy as this Court has expressed that.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh, I'm sorry, we suggested some in the last argument. You have a history of union organizing and union involvement in politics, and the last sentence says in light of all this, vote for Jones.
GENERAL KAGAN: I think that that wouldn't be covered, Mr. Chief Justice. The FEC is very careful and says this in all its regulations to view matters as a whole. And as a whole that book would not count as express advocacy.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, General.
I personally don't find the government's argument here persuasive, especially in light of why Fahrenheit 9/11 (a documentary very critical of the Bush administration released during the 2004 election cycle), clearly a corporate work, was deemed acceptable by the FEC, but Hillary: The Movie was somehow not. I'd love to hear a steelman of the FEC's choices there, because I find it really unpersuasive. Maybe there's something on the "corporate" angle there, but I have trouble with the idea that such an important constitutional right disappears as soon as you band together. And if you go that route, it seems like you're limiting rights only to the monied class: it prevents crowdfunding to fly a branded blimp, but wouldn't preclude, say, Elon Musk deciding to fund that same blimp by himself. If you think "paying other people" for that blimp comes into play, I hope you don't need to pay someone else to put up billboards. It's just turtles all the way down, even if I'm not completely happy with the final decision.
ETA: I'm not even convinced that current Justice Kagan would side with General Kagan of the time here.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
That does seem like the most likely outcome, especially with the current high court, but there have been cases where courts have "pressed X to doubt" on questionable factual assertions by the executive. "Is there lawlessness on the streets of [several cities] sufficient to send in the National Guard?" is one such case that's ongoing (I largely expect SCOTUS to side with the executive there, for better or worse). But I guess half a century of Tradition! in this case is only one of "arbitrary and capricious".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
WRT Hemani, it really seems like some court at some point needs to question whether marijuana really fits the definition of a Schedule I controlled substance. I'm not a user, or even a fan of it, but "no known medical use" seems pretty flat on its face given that most states have accepted medical uses. But I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath for government policy to have to, uh, actually make sense to a lay person like me, and it doesn't impact me directly anyway.
Maybe if a hypothetical right wing administration tried to put Mifepristone on that list would we actually see some questions about "rational basis" here. But (fortunately, at least for my moderate views on abortion) the broader right seems mostly-okay(?) with the status quo where the FDA has legalized and regulated it nationwide, despite newfound state regulation of other (non-drug-induced) methods.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
TIL: It had only one until 2022 (and had two previously last century). My memory wasn't completely wrong there.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Without drastically changing how representatives work, Montana's one house seat isn't going to reflect its entire populace. By some definitions, single-seat states are the most gerrymandered (slaps roof "this district can fit so many minorities without giving any of them representation!"), although clearly not so by local legislative intent.
IMO it'd be nicer to just agree not to hit each other at all rather than arguing over how much is too much.
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