curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
With that in mind consider the possibility (just the possibility) that the current administration is not as stupid and incompetent as so many like to imagine it is, and instead is operating within constraints and frameworks you may not have considered.
I have seriously considered this possibility and it just doesn't comport with how the administration actually acts. When the administration succeeds, such as when they removed Maduro, it's not something that requires competence on the part of the administration themselves, they just have to give the word, because conservatives already wanted Maduro gone and the US military's already the best in the business. But when anything requires competence on the part of the admin, especially things like Liberation Day, DOGE, they're just poorly executed and don't particularly accomplish their stated goals or any obvious secret ones.
trying to fight them is not a winning move ... how do we remove the maximum number of Illegal immigrants while staying within the bounds of both our capabilities and principles?
If this is true then you've already lost! Your premise is that anything you do that actually removes enough illegal immigrants to matter by your values, to cause the real changes to the American economy and society, by your values will be blocked by business interests who don't like those changes. And your response to that is - how can we remove a small enough number of immigrants that it doesn't actually matter, but we still feel like we're doing something? Why even bother at that point? I don't think the premise is correct, a lot of things are possible, things happen today that didn't seem very possible a few decades ago. I think it's possible a more competent Trump could succeed with mandatory e-verify, and also possible that he could fail, and that Trump mostly just doesn't care enough about generic illegal immigrant laborers (as opposed to criminals from insane asylums in the Congo) to take the risk, and also is acting through the lens of an entertainer and e-verify just isn't good TV.
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
Any asset can be a shitcoin if retail bids it hard enough. There are good reasons for silver to have gone up, but nowhere near this much. Retail sees it, like gold, as a way to invest in "hard money", to avoid your dollars being inflated away, except it's cheaper than gold. And then they're not price sensitive about it at all. And then it gets high enough that speculators get washed out by new margin requirements, big buyers of silver get nervous they'll be screwed if it goes up more and lock in the price, people get short squeezed. For the same reason that accurate prices are good for an economy, this is bad for the economy! It causes silver to be inefficiently allocated among productive enterprises, all so gamblers can get their fix, because Seahawks vs Patriots isn't quite as exciting as pumping a trillion dollar market cap asset.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
I am not really a Red Triber but the online right has no end of weird sexualized insults towards the left. Many of them are funny. Sexualized insults are pretty common among young guys in general
ICE has deployed approximately 3000 federal agents to Minneapolis. Supposing ICE is in fact, after the bad guys, they should probably be done by now, because they only had to arrest five people each in order to get all of the highly criminal illegals out.
What? How are you expecting 3000 people to investigate 15,000 crimes and arrest 15,000 people in a month? The hard part of making an arrest isn't handcuffing the guy and driving him away, you need to figure out who committed the crime!
ICE should have plenty of evil criminals and pedophiles and whatnot to chase down - how and why do they have the time to go get this guy who appears to be causing no issues, other than being illegal
Many Republicans want to deport all the illegal immigrants! Even if they haven't committed any crimes. It's a whole thing. They have a lot of arguments for it They may be bad arguments, but if you're going to make this point to said Republicans you need to engage with those arguments.
Many other republicans and centrists only want to deport 'migrant criminals' and are uncomfortable uprooting the lives of people who aren't bothering anyone. Which is why Trump focuses on the people from 'jails and insane asylums' and vacillates about who exactly should be deported. But the people running ICE and the people you're arguing with here mostly just want to deport them all.
I agree with (c), and agree with (d) insofar as Trump and many allies don't want the political backlash it'd create to actually deport them all, but to say their sole goal is 'to intimidate and cause chaos' is reductive. The Trump Administration is not a singular coherent entity, you can't reason out their goals by assuming their actions are well thought through. Some people inside the admin really want to deport them all, and tend to have control over and focus more on ICE or immigration policy. And, yeah, want to intimidate the city libs and use the chaos to signal to potential illegal immigrants it's not worth coming. And often don't understand that their theater isn't the same as the real thing. Some people inside the admin don't want to deport them all, and when combined with business interests are able to push back against e-verify and let the hawks have some theater as a treat. And Trump's an entertainer, and 'sending ICE to Minneapolis' is made for TV in a way 'prevent illegal immigration with electronic forms' isn't.
curious_straight_ca
3d ago
Yeah I do consider that lying but just as a factual matter most NYT articles don't do that. Some do! Most don't! I never claimed they never do that! But it seems to be quite difficult to report on facts that are of interest to politics without lying frequently, approximately nobody on any political side seems to do it well, and it's still useful to know the things the news reports despite that.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
This is also just false as factual matter. Most normal journalists, including at the NYT, are writing articles like "Major US Public Transit Systems Brace For Storm With Detours And Warnings", and even the politics ones are mostly writing articles that are accurate.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
If that video was the median Amelia meme I would've said something different!
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I at least find your content more interesting than your style!
Nobody needs the opinion of a journalist; his job is to affirm the opinion of the consumer
Journalists are over-hated. They provide a valuable service of collecting, verifying, and disseminating raw facts like "white house staffer told me this EO is coming" or "this company is merging with that company". It's not as noble a profession as they think it is, and they are of course not perfect at it, but merely being passable at it while making frequent mistakes with significant bias is still very valuable.
Columbia represented both the philosophical principles of the American founding (I may disagree with many, but they are serious and substantial) as well as a concrete people civilizing the frontier and building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. Amelia is a cute hot girl that represents no immigrants. Which is fine, but just not as substantial. Amelia is funny, and and accurately represents that the culture it comes from cares more about 'edgy memes' and 'looking at picture of attractive girls' than it does philosophical principles or material accomplishments. It's not that the former two are bad, they have their place, just... You can see this in the art, compare to this. I think Amelia's just a random internet meme of no unusual significance either positive or negative, but to the extent it really is "an abstract personification of your nation/culture/value system" what it says isn't good.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
One could say that since humans evolved to conceal ovulation, so that males would have sex with females outside the females' fertile period, unprotected sex naturally serves both to make children and as as a way to signal that two people are mates. And then it seems plausible that sex with condoms, fellatio, etc could serve the same purpose.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean is a song i'm fond of.
Amelia is ... less ... than all of those, though. It does accurately signify many aspects of the culture/value system it emerges from, just not in a good way. It's just an internet meme about a hot girl. And even that's fine, I guess, the problem is there's nothing else.
I simply think it doesn't matter much, most of the goodwill America gets from other countries is based not on media exports or high-quality propaganda but on actual strategic interests and demonstrable benefits of cooperation
It's not exactly media or propaganda, but much of the goodwill depends on both elite and popular moral/ideological alignment - freedom, progress, democracy, rule of law, capitalism, not being evil totalitarians, racism sexism bad, etc. People genuinely believe in the stuff, in a softer but still significant version of the way people used to be religious. And also care about them as symbols for less pure but no less powerful social animal reasons. And I think that effect explains as much of the turnaround we're seeing now as material interests do.
that I had stopped posting here because it's a purely American Affairs Discussion community
That's not really how I see it, I see it as a place to discuss anything with interesting people, most of the posts I like the most have nothing to do with American politics directly. But I also don't find the 100th post about police shootings interesting.
ends the North American fraternal relationship and likely the entire post -WWII order
How long will that end last, though? Trump only has three more years in office. If a dem wins in 2028 and Europe elects a few more populist right leaders itself, European unity against the US might stop being appealing. And the fundamental fact of US military and economic power relative to Europe isn't going to disappear, unless Trump does something even worse than what he's done so far and doesn't TACO for once. I don't think "free trade pacts" and "strategic partnerships" are going to be what mark the real end of the post-WWII international order.
The costs of winning the Culture War
It's interesting, and irritating if one has right-wing sympathies, how contingent this all is on Trump's particular combination of talent as an entertainer and lack of desire to be at all serious about government. The thing Trump's projecting to the world is comedic incompetence, and other countries are responding to that as they should. The story isn't really about ideology or the cost of winning, it's just that Trump wasn't really a win at all.
Not that Dase's comment was perfect, but given it was prompted by crushed accusing him of being an "agent of the People's Republic of China" in a post that didn't otherwise have much interesting content, I hope it doesn't lead to a ban
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I don't think any of this makes sense. Any 'rational' approach to sex in this sense wouldn't involve sex with women you won't have kids with. A non-secure marriage is still the best route to kids, other than sperm donation. Modern women and men have lifetime single digits of sexual partners and most end up in one or a series of long-term relationships if not an actual marriage. Players and pumping and dumping just aren't the experience most people are having. And if players generally burn out, but many people who get in insecure marriages don't, what does that really say?
Not that this is a knockdown argument against patriarchy or legally enforced marriage commitments, there's more complexity there, it's just that Jim is very wrong.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I don't think this is true. You can embed pragmatic judgements into laws or have them happen in regulatory agencies. We already have laws about undisclosed advertisements in various contexts, which requires defining advertisements. There would absolutely be attempts to work around the laws, but said workarounds would probably be less annoying and less frequent than ads currently are, so that'd still be an improvement. Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd, but just ban excessive advertising for some sort of specific sense of excessive.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero
I would bet like all of my net worth against this. Being told a product exists makes you realize you might buy it. Being told something exists 500 times makes the average person more likely to realize you might buy it. Big companies have tried reducing ad spend and measuring if it reduces profits, and it has, and then they restarted ad spend.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
And it does cost $395/year, for the cheapest tier, 'X Premium+', that actually removes all instead of some twitter ads, which is a nontrivial fraction (something like 1/100th) of the median personal income in the US.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content
I think the stronger argument against ads is more that the median ad that makes someone purchase something is causing them to make a purchase that they probably shouldn't in a more ideal world, and people both do that and accept their time being wasted with extremely repetitive advertising because they're bad at making tradeoffs. So that people 'accept the cost' isn't a strong counterargument. And idk if the internet or sports would be doomed or particularly harmed without this much advertising, the economy is an equilibrium, people really like sports and the internet and would find other ways to pay for it. I'm not sure your last paragraph is an argument for advertising specifically more than it is an argument for a class of intellectuals with independent funding and has strong influence over the information diet of the average American. But as I said in my other comment I don't think the problem here is really the ads, it's the things being advertised.
I like some things about this idea of making advertising illegal. It's good to notice that there's something wrong here. That the amount of effort we put into saturating the mind of the median consumer with the names of brands just seems excessive. Amazon, Walmart, State Farm, Verizon, L’Oréal, DraftKings, etc - if it's been more than 10 minutes since you've seen one of those words, that's an inefficiency and the invisible hand's working to correct it. Why should so many competent people spend their 9/5 in marketing ensuring normal people purchase more makeup or clothing or food or parlays that doesn't particularly improve their lives? I get the concept of advertising as presenting consumers with information they might not have so they can make better purchase, but we've clearly gone beyond that.
On the other hand, the problem here isn't really advertising. It's not like DraftKings or running up credit card debt by shopping would disappear if we banned ads. It'd happen less, but only somewhat less. The problems people identify with advertising, I would argue, are really problems with the things being advertised, and in general with modern culture or whatever. Advertising by itself serves a useful purpose, connecting people selling things to people buying them. If something's broken in there, advertising will be broken too, but banning advertising doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Also, I mostly agree with FiveHour's post.
I think I uncomplicatedly support a law of the form "you must allow ad-blockers, not circumvent them, and provide the option to disable ads in native apps where ad-blockers don't work" though, because though uBlock gets everything in a browser they still do waste my time sometimes.
curious_straight_ca
16d ago
They could kill 12k people if they wanted to, you're right it isn't hard. But I don't think they want to, and 12k deaths seems to me to be inconsistent with videos/images and reports coming out of Iran. There'd just be more evidence if true.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I mean I'm sure there's a moderately strong correlation among the general population, and a weaker but still significant one if you control for socioeconomic status (not intended as a euphemism, although lol), but I think this is worded too strongly to be true. Plenty of people are relatively honest in business dealings but have a strong sex drive and not a strong desire to be loyal.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence
Sure, it doesn't imply anything, but your one twin study from 2002 doesn't either. There's a lot of debate on the issue, and the person who I respect the most (Alex Strudwick Young)'s best guess iirc is around 50%.
It's entirely possible and in fact extremely likely he's who he really is and it's still disinformation/grift. There's selection bias here, if 95 of 100 Army SF people are reasonable and epistemically virtuous, 4 in 100 are a bit crazy but don't post on social media, and 1 decides to go all out telling ChatGPT to add color to their uninformed speculation and post it on twitter, you'll only see the 1.
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