anti_dan
9hr ago
Yeah. I've always understood horseshoe theory as an invention of necessity for socialists/communists to sanitize themselves of the obvious similarities they shared with the Nazis. In many ways, the Fascist is just a socialist who has realized they can do 99% of what they want to do without the burden of having to actually run the means of production (and get the blame when they inevitably fail at doing so) by just imposing regulations and mandates. Its not your fault the steel industry failed because it had to compete with foreign steel that didn't have to be made using gold dust, it was your stupid capitalists who failed the gold dust mandate.
anti_dan
9hr ago
This whole thing seems semi-delusional in a delusions of grandeur sort of way. He has this whole theory of politics that elevates his quirky specialty to near-magical status, and then applies that theory is a way most flattering to his own political preferences. The right having a well funded and tightly organized right wing in 2011? Is he talking about Rush Limbaugh and Fox News? Two voices yelling into a hurricane of leftist media that was slowly ceding ground at the time to leftist social media?
Its all way too much and I don't find it accurate or prescient. Just kinda silly. It is after all basically the writings of a college professor in his elder years after several decades spent in a bubble of university leftism.
anti_dan
20hr ago
No one knows or cares who that guy is. Maybe some frogs would be rude about it. Fox News certainly won't be platforming people who speculate he was killed by his own fan celebrating.
If he's executed at an "Appalachian outreach" event there'd be somber reaction from the right. Perhaps some jokes if he gets killed ironically. Like by a Palestinian
anti_dan
1d ago
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
If Charlie Kirk was killed by a spray and pray tactic taken up by some switch modified AR-15 this might be a valid comparison along the lines of, "this was his stupid prize for playing the stupid game of supporting the 2nd Amendment," but this was nothing like that. None of the laws Kirk opposed would have saved his life even with perfect implementation.
This is a routine problem of people pretending non-like things are like, or like things are non-like. Its silly.
anti_dan
1d ago
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
I doubt this. First of all, there is a reason there is no leftwing version of Kirk, which is because lefty influence is distributed. If someone kills all the presidents of the Ivy League + AOC + the NYT editorial board, that is a lot of killing to get to the kind of impact that one bullet achieved here.
Secondly, we've seem Republican reactions to violence, and they are not positive. At worst you can sometimes see things being joke-worthy and the right making some crude jokes, like the Paul Pelosi homosexual prostitute situation.
anti_dan
3d ago
Why is he the natural successor? Anytime he's been in the spotlight he has either been boring or incompetent. Maybe Black Americans don't like him because of the gay stuff, but that's just them stumbling into the right opinion that every other Democrat should already be pretty close to. Its not like South Bend was the Mecca of the Midwest when he was mayor, it was crap and got worse while he was in charge. This is a city with Notre Freaking Dame propping it up and it still manages to have out of control crime and drug problems. His Transportation stint was probably even worse, mostly defined by being MIA and/or mismanaging crises.
anti_dan
3d ago
Riot support is closer to the line than many leftists probably would like it to be. Financial support for riots/ers is a crime after all
anti_dan
6d ago
I don't think this actually applies this time. Multiple meat space humans have celebrated this in front of me
anti_dan
7d ago
Unlike Fuentes, Kirk did a lot of public appearances, so even if he's not nearly as provocative a figure he was simply more exposed. I personally never thought of Kirk as anything more a suited buffoon - a borderline caricature of a YR. Not a figure of any real note. The only reason I can think of to go after Kirk is pure availability on the part of a shooter who was determined to shoot somebody.
Charlie Kirk hasn't been a buffoon for years. This is an old bias you hold.
Instead he is(was) basically the equivalent of what Democrats would call grassroots movement for most of the last 5 years. In other words, he was normie conservative.
But still he was assassinated because???
anti_dan
7d ago
I would say that it is probably the most shocking video I have seen this year. Maybe the most shocking since 9/11. I havent really recovered from it because it was presented to me in a very awkward way and I was totally unprepared to see an assassination play out (more or less someone asked me if "I had seen what happened with Charlie Kirk?" then showed me the video).
But its just a 30-something guy in a button down sitting with a microphone, and then pop-blood. So much blood.
anti_dan
7d ago
A company I used to do jobs for had a pretty good team that churned out steady work and a decent number of patents a year. Nothing that makes a practice, but a good client. They had a 56 year old guy on the team that was clearly slowing down, but still was sharp, just not 8am-8pm shift sort of on his game. But he was the best at helping me draft their patents. Any questions, go to Richard. Richard picks up the phone every time and always can clarify a point with a helpful few sentences, and then go on to point out some more things he thinks were not explained properly in the specs they sent over (almost always correct). So this guy was still a good engineer, and outstanding communicator. One day they submit a spec and his names on it but he doesn't pick up. Ask another guy, "oh Richard had to leave." That sucks I say. Something about being in the bottom 30% of deliverables 2 years in a row.
anti_dan
8d ago
This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.
On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!
anti_dan
8d ago
A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.
anti_dan
8d ago
This appears to be a consistent failure mechanism with all "high skill immigration." Because there are clear metrics, they are clearly game-able by motivated by people who are from a worse country and have no buy in to the social contract of the country they are moving to.
anti_dan
8d ago
My thoughts exactly. But this case is simply illustrative. I work with engineers in my law practice. My brother is an engineer. I swear, these firms treat age 50 as if it is death, and 45 as pushing the reaper. If someone in mid/mid-sr management on the engineering side gets laid off and they are over 50, they might as well just start their own model train shop right away. There simply is no appetite to hire them, even at 1/2 rungs below where they were let go from. This is why people in the industry have such skepticism about the whole model of immigrant labor. Companies inevitably ignore dozens or hundreds of qualified domestic candidates, often accompanied with a very specifically worded job posting. That then gets forwarded to the H1b agency that takes a half dozen even less qualified foreigners and writes them perfect resumes for the position (regardless of the truthiness of those words), and now you have 3 engineers for the price of 1! Or do you? For some reason the project is always "going well" or "coming along". But deliverables always seem lacking, often the claim is they are contingent on someone else's work (who is often some recent StateU grad, and "his work" is the whole project).
anti_dan
9d ago
In a world where 16 year olds from time to time boost cars then leave them on the side of the road 30 feet from where they stole them, and then grow into productive citizens, this is how the criminal justice system should work.
In the world of the county I currently reside, this is instead the progression: 12-16 year olds regularly boost cars for their gangs. The gangs turn them into parts and they disappear into the black market and no owner ever sees them again. Then somewhere in the 16-21 year old age range they graduate to armed robbery and hijacking. Sometimes someone is shot, sometimes luckily not. If no one dies and they are 16 or 17, they get out in 3 years! If 18-21, 20 years. If they are the juvie, well they prolly do it again, or something else dumb like dealing drugs while armed. Then they get hit with a good 7-10. Now both sets of these juvies are lucky, they did no murders in their 20s, so they are likely about to age out of the violent crime demo. They are resigned to a life (mostly) of drug dealing, retail (or amazon delivery) thieving, and other antisocial, but usually nonviolent activities at this point. In any case the system that applied above makes no sense for the scenario here, and I gave a rosy scenario. No one has actually been shot or killed, merely placed in the extreme danger of being shot or killed.
The problem isn't that rehabilitation doesn't work as an absolute measure. Its that the places it would work are often the places where it is so rarely needed, no one even thinks about implementing it.
anti_dan
9d ago
It also is one with, from my perspective, mostly imagined tradeoffs. The problem with incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts or otherwise exists in the low wage market (and fir the first 3, very prominently in the H1b market), but the tradeoff for employers looking abroad vs. at home at the high end is mostly about age discrimination and wage expectations. Take, for example, this recent viral tweet: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1964097707636625671
Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).
So what will he do? Likely he will give up on the idea, but if he doesn't he's likely to try the H1b route. And if you are familiar with that you will know there will be many applicants with resumes that say they have experience designing and fabricating large transformers under various industry standards. They will not. If the company ever launches it will flounder and never get out a product until this guy caves and pays an old guy, OR one of his like 25 year old incidental white guy hires from Colorado School of Mines befriends one of those old white guys and fixes everything.
anti_dan
11d ago
Zoning laws are more bipartisan than you let on, and, given that most local governments are saddled with many state and federal mandates, are unfortunately necessary. In a more libertarian world you might be right, but I can't say I've ever lived in that world.
But consider this, town of 20k people with mostly or all high income single family units plus a quaint downtown. Now, the school district is "awesome" (in other words it contains children who are intelligent and nonviolent/disruptive). Some developer decides to knock down 10 houses and build a 40 story slum. This just absolutely blows up the finances for the town. They now need a whole new plumbing system, double the cops, and, most expensively, their school now sucks. These kids pay way less per capita in taxes, plus they run around stabbing other kids. Libertarianism has many good aspects, but far too many on that side dont understand you need to do things in order. You cant have no zoning laws without repealing the CRA and eliminating the public school system. It just doesn't make sense.
Other tariffs. Excessive FDA regulatory burden. The existence of patent law. The Jones Act.
Tariffs are another similar case. When you think about it, it is objectively unfair to American workers that we have the FDA, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, etc and then they have to compete against someone who can burn coal and dump arsenic into rivers.
I'd be very interested in your patent law take. I've worked in it extensively and it mostly works well outside of pharmaceuticals and a few "innovative" patent categories (which IMO the patent acts as written shouldn't ever have applied to. To get an idea of those categories of what IMO are fake/illegal patent categories see Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo v. Prometheus, and Alice Corp.
I don't actually think I, or anyone actually knows what the Jones act does. It outwardly seems fairly stupid.
anti_dan
12d ago
So you like Obamacare and dislike tariffs. Thats fine. Whats the cost imposing measure that was implemented before tariffs that you dislike as much?
anti_dan
12d ago
There is that, but also I just think Iowans and Nebraskans are generally pretty good at self-governance, and they'd have none of the built up bureaucracy that Israel has from its early years that were much more socialist in origin. It is still a fairly dysfunctional government as we've seen with the Supreme Court's battles with Bibi.
Generally busting a bunch of Americans out of the complicated regulatory environment that exists in America would usually result in explosive growth.
anti_dan
13d ago
Today’s absurdity is Gaza. A carnival of cruelty, with no obvious exit strategy. Israel has never had a real theory of victory, no one has yet offered a real plan for Gaza going forward, a few Israeli cranks on the right wing will at least attempt to forward real plans for genocide or ethnic cleansing, but mostly everyone still talks about a two-state solution that will obviously never come to be. Israel will not allow any group that could govern Gaza to govern Gaza, will neither absorb Gaza nor let it go, will neither integrate the Palestinians nor murder them in numbers significant enough to achieve population reduction. Gaza is kept in desperate famine, but not exterminated; it is kept miserable but not destroyed. And the vast majority of US politicians stand with Israel, and are more concerned with campus no-no words than with ongoing physical cruelty to no obvious end.
This part seems shoehorned into your post without you really making the connection. I don't think it accurately portrays the situation in Gaza, which is part of the reason it simply does not fit the pattern. Gaza, simply put, may be a carnival of cruelty, but it is self imposed. The people of Gaza prefer being poor and hungry to being non-violent and cooperative neighbors. They have expressed this again and again. And part of the problem with that is you assertion that a "vast majority" of US politicians stand with Israel is false. Most will mouth words in that direction from time to time, but particularly Democrats, are quick to criticize any effective military or law enforcement action by Israel. Because of this, the US imposes significant restraints on Israeli action (preventing the ethnic cleansing/genocide or even just a real blockade, for example) which means Hamas always has the whip hand in Gaza. Gazans largely like Hamas, it appears, but those who don't fear Hamas much more than they fear Israel. For as bad as some actions have been on a small scale, Netanyahu is never going to condone raping the wives of Hamas militants while their babies burn to death in an over. And I don't think Israel needs to go THAT far to win this war. But from Vietnam to Afghanistan, we have consistently learned that occupations with a soft touch are doomed to failure.
ISTM the most clear and least cruel path forward is a worldwide Israeli green light to level any building, whether it be a school, hospital, or bunker, where there is reasonable suspicion a Hamas person or article is present. Realistically, this is most of Gaza. Following a WWII Tokyo like bombing campaign over the majority of the territory, perhaps the people of Gaza will elect new leadership and come to an armistice. That could, theoretically be followed by one of a few scenarios:
- 3 state solution. Gaza and West Bank being separate.
- Annexation. Both Gaza and W/B are annexed by Egypt and Jordan.
- Some Hybrid of 1&2.
I would expect under #1, both would quickly become very well off states provided they don't go back into the terrorism game. Trump often spouts BS, but he is absolutely correct that they are both excellent locations for a prosperous state, given the right leadership and populace. I expect, for example, if you put a bunch of Iowans in Gaza and Nebraskans in West Bank, both would swiftly approach or exceed Israel in GDP/Capita.
anti_dan
13d ago
Were you born after 2008? because people were definitely Big Mad. The outrage reduced over time, but only because Obamacare is actually decent policy. (And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)
Not generally, from you. Its not good policy at all. Medicaid should be abandoned not expanded. Implementing the mandate and coverage on preexisting conditions has caused a cost spiral in the personal/family health insurance market. Trump hasn't gotten rid of it because 1) He has never had close to the votes; 2) He doesn't really care, its not his issue; and 3) Taking away benefits causes farm more wailing than imposing diffused and hidden costs. The cost to the economy of Obamacare is equivalent of probably a 100% tariff on all goods in perpetuity.
anti_dan
14d ago
I don't like trump because he's made my situation materially worse and is likely to continue to do so. I don't like trump because he profits the outgroup at the expense of the ingroup. I don't like trump because I'm ideologically and morally opposed to his positions. I don't like trump because I think he is, personally, a very immoral individual.
But how? Unless you are a rulebreaker or someone who gets money from the government for non-poverty or oldness related reasons you cant have been. If you are amongst the rulebreakers, certainly you knew you were, right? The rules as written are much harsher than the Trump rules. The third option is tariffs.
If you are a government subsidy for non-poverty reasons-er, well that could always have ended at any time right? Was your work nonpartisan? Like were you researching how to grow trees with wood 2x as strong in 1/18 the time? Or were you doing something else?
The tariff affected I see and understand. Its a rapid change in the business environment, and those always suck. If you can show me an approximately equal amount of outrage about the passage and implementation of Obamacare you are certified fresh to complain about the Trump tariffs.
anti_dan
19d ago
Normal people dont take videos of other people, particularly children, unless there is something positive happening. If you are an adult male taking a video of an underage female, you better be taking a video of your niece that you are sending to her grandparents. Outside of that sort of situation, you are the problem.
If we take this situation in the light most favorable to the video maker, he is a wierdo man who walks up to 12 year old girls then films their reaction to him.
I mean, it is theoretically possible if you have the rare case of a guy who was fired from his job for no fault of his own and needs some money for food and shelter until he gets another job. In that hypothetical you are preserving the theoretical productivity of a person just long enough until they return to productivity.
In practice even unemployment insurance as implemented is not even this. Last I checked, most users of UI are repeat users. The rest of the redistribution programs fail even harder. The problem with giving money to people to keep them alive is it doesn't wean them off. Its just a self licking ice cream cone in social program form. That is, unfortunately, the Achilles heel of EA as currently styled as well. You have to account for future expenses as well.
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