anon_
2hr ago
Oh I agree, I'm not particularly partisan anyway. But Republicans (or conservatives generally) should probably root for the wing of the Democrats (or liberals generally) that are somewhat less than completely insane.
Even if they are rooting for them quietly.
anon_
1d ago
They warned about it because they considered any possible policy that they didn't like authoritarian.
anon_
1d ago
I'm not sure why would you be antipathetic towards the only part of the Dem apparatus that produces something least resembling nonsense? What purpose could that possibly serve? To elevate the AOC weirdos?
anon_
2d ago
Oh come on. China ended 1988 with a GDP of $325B as compared to the US $5.XT
Almost all of China's growth and power has accrued after 2000.
anon_
2d ago
But will Democrats become double-negative-polarized in his favor then?
I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.
Dankest timeline, etc...
anon_
2d ago
How would the situation be different, if the House GOP simply couldn't get its shit together? Aren't they generally unable to get their shit together and isn't Trump generally exceeding limits on executive power faster than they can be enforced?
"The House GOP" isn't a singular entity with a cohesive purpose and rational preferences. It is an agglomeration of representatives, and even if they are each individually cohesive and rational, Ken Arrow already told us that this doesn't translate to the aggregate.
anon_
2d ago
Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?
There is lefty overreaction/derangement to actual issues. Just because they would complain at anything doesn't mean everything they complain about is nothing.
An unreliable source crying wolf doesn't actually give you a lot of information on whether there is a wolf one way or the other.
anon_
2d ago
I'm quite sure I can find a shock collar on eBay or FB marketplace.
Not that I think people are scheming to conceal these purchases, but the principle is bonkers.
anon_
4d ago
I agree that the tranch setup distributed risk as advertised. The problem was that much of market (including CDO sellers) believed in their models that used a gaussian copula, which vastly underestimated the tails as compared to a power law.
This wasn't "sellers pull a fast one on buyers" -- that's too simplistic a model. They got into the business because they convinced themselves of an overall model that didn't put enough weight on the tail risks. Then they kept the most junior tranches because of that belief in the low overall risk.
[ There's a related problem which is that gaussian models are extremely sensitive to parameter changes in ways that power laws aren't. When you get to the CDO-squared (a CDO of CDOs) then you the output of one model being fed as an input to another, with the expected impact to accuracy. ]
See, e.g., this excellent summary: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Barnett-Hart_2009.pdf
anon_
4d ago
No, they assumed it was uncorrelated and that you could lower risk by bundling large tranches of mortgages.
That works until there is a large correlated event that impacts all of them at once.
anon_
4d ago
No different than any other public obligation or liability. Might as well shaft municipal bondholders too on this theory,
anon_
5d ago
Right, and I think the OP is trying to shoehorn "the defendant didn't trust the police/state" into that set, as some kind of faux-historical analog of "things that can't be held against you in court".
anon_
5d ago
The problem with the '07-08 crisis wasn't with the returns, it's that the loans were packaged into MBS and sold to investors under a false bill of health. The lessons weren't that you can't have high-risk/high-return assets, only that you must not try to pawn them off as low risk with fanciful assumptions. And that buyers of those collateralized debt must do more diligence.
anon_
5d ago
Why is "civilizationally load bearing" a relevant yardstick? Civilization advances by making all that stuff trivial so people can focus on doing other shit. That's the the measure of civilization, not who produces corn.
And no one that has ever worked in textiles would dare assert that it's in any way worse than an office job. That shit destroys your body.
anon_
5d ago
To be fair, most government-paid civil engineers take a much lower salary than they could in the private sector. So it's not quite that this guy figured out a hack here, only that he sacrificed early to reap a larger return later. Similarly the State took the inverse deal: pay him less now in exchange for more later, in order to make their budgets temporarily look better.
I think the solution for both is actuarial integrity -- defined benefit plans need to be run in such a way that the State pays in year X the expected future costs of all (incremental) future liabilities accrued during year X. The only real exploitation is that voters in X accrue liability for year >X without paying for it, another intertemporal transfer of wealth.
A non-solution (afaict) is for governments not to hire competent civil servants and instead farm that stuff out to McKinsey consultants and others. Not because the McKinsey consultants aren't smart, but because it's a diffusion of accountability that ultimately costs Idaho more than paying competitive salaries for in-house expertise.
[ One astute commenter noted that one good that McKinsey does produce is laundering the low status of working for bumfuck Idaho into PMC-respectability. An excellent observation, if something of a tangent here. ]
Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.
Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions. Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note. It's not like dumping it on the fisc.
Their retirement on the public dime, OTOH, will certainly be dumped on us.
anon_
5d ago
I don’t think “the defendant burned the bodies” would ever fall in those narrow categories.
anon_
6d ago
Should a defendant's distrust of the police be held against him in court?
It certainly should be presented to the court as a matter of fact.
There are a very small number of exceptional situations in which factually true things cannot be said in court -- for example, a prosecutor cannot comment on the defendant's refusal to testify in his own defense. Those exceptions are few and far between, and they prove that the rule applies in all other cases.
anon_
15d ago
But you can use it to hire some Koreans that can check code into a global repository instead of Americans.
The value of the code written by that subsidiary goes into the conglomerate at large.
anon_
16d ago
Isn't that literally what you did when you dimissed hydroacetylene point about viewpoint discrimination in therapy by pointing out that medical professionals discriminate against viewpoints like "disease is caused by bad humors" and "disease is caused by spiritual rot"?
That was an example to demonstrate the principle at work -- namely that viewpoint discrimination is intrinsically part of professional licensure. It wasn't some specific example.
The restrictions medical professionals put on adults wanting to do this are much stricter than the ones placed on children wanting to do it as part of gender affirming care.
I'm not too sure about that, but I don't think it's worth litigating at this point in the thread. At the least, the point remains that an adult can have (e.g.) her tubes tied.
Except Guyatt's own research shows that there isn't really evidence that treating gender dysphoria helps anyone.
There isn't evidence, and so in its absence the establishment chose to believe something that wasn't forbidden to them by the research.
There's a famous Scott piece on the different epistemic burdens people put when faced with assessing things they do and don't want to believe. In the former it's "not excluded by the evidence" and in the latter it's "not mandated by the evidence".
Obviously we both agree those beliefs were largely wrong, so what is left to debate here?
anon_
16d ago
this runs into complications like how Hamas has already engaged in gun battles with gazan clans as it tries to re-assert control, which goes significant premise of Hamas being removed as the military and civil authority of Gaza.
I mean, this is very much understating the extent to which the ceasefire is a chance for Hamas to execute its domestic opposition.
anon_
16d ago
The Palestinians were squeezed between the IDF and the Egyptian/Qatari axis.
I doubt open hostilities rekindle that soon. There's too much graft to be skimmed from the rebuilding/humanitarian operations. Time some fat years.
anon_
16d ago
The evidence is that the company still exists.
I can't stress this enough -- a bad CEO can destroy the entire thing as an ongoing concern. The companies with those CEOs literally don't exist any more.
Insert the picture of the military planes coming back with the bullet holes.
anon_
16d ago
No, these firms have net foreign revenue that they want to repatriate to the US. In fact, that's the bigger thing they are taxed on.
Microsoft (just to pick an example, could be any of them) can fully fund their entire Indian and Vietnamese operations with a fraction of their overseas revenue. The money would have never entered the US in the first place.
Forgetting the optimal ratio, what is the actual ratio? Like what fraction of individuals killed in what was ultimately judged to be self defense fall into the bucket of "basically OK guy, got in a fight with his neighbor over a dumb thing" vs "hot-headed asshole who nevertheless mostly had his shit together and contributed somewhat to society" vs "degenerate/parasite/criminal that never held down a decent job or did anything for anyone else"?
I'm not sure whether if these three categories are really the right dividing point, but they seem like at least a good start at "lifetime felon" vs "bad neighbor".
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