dev
11d ago
Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms.
The manufacturing "real value added" number is simply a terrible statistic that no one who cites it actually understands. For instance, U.S. has lost its competitive advantage in microprocessors to Taiwan, and basically doesn't manufacture motherboards, memory, LCD panels, etc, but because overall computer quality has made such incredible leaps and bounds a "quality adjustment" is applied to overall nominal dollar value added of whatever US manufacturing remains and that quality adjustment is basically responsible for the entire increase in manufacturing. Worse, they don't even apply the same quality adjustment to the inputs (value added is output minus inputs) so the entire number is just FUBAR. And the same thing applies to other categories -- automobiles, clothes. The number is just a train wreck.
dev
25d ago
A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.
dev
25d ago
Seems like the real screw-up here is that USG does not actually have an encrypted secure internal chat that they can use for cross department collaboration. With USG's intelligence budget, that is absolutely inexcusable. Goldberg in the article says that they should have used a SCIF which they all have installed at their home. That is utterly impractical, trying to coordinate two dozen officials to all be home or at the office in their SCIF at the same time is just not going to be possible. So if the option is 1) communicate over something highly secure but imperfect and with a lousy UX that makes it hard to quickly see who everyone is and that mixes internal and external contacts or 2) simply don't communicate at all, it's not actually obvious to me that 1) is worse. Ultimately, even as bad as this mistake was ... nothing actually bad happened as a result of accidentally adding Goldberg and so it's not clear to me that it would have been better if these officials had simply never had the conservation at all.
dev
1mo ago
It's not about their intention. Constitutionally, it would be fine to say that as minors the children obviously are under the same legal jurisdiction of the parents, and so the child should be deported with the parents and would be a citizen of their home country and not an American subject and not a citizen. Only if they slip through the cracks and make it to age of majority without ever establishing themselves as a subject of a foreign country, can I see the case that the child should be then considered an American citizen.
dev
1mo ago
As I understand it, in the 1860s there wasn't really a concept of an illegal immigrant. A person did not need permission to reside in the United States. So all the gypsies and Chinese who had established residency in the U.S. would be the modern equivalent of either a green card holder or an American national.
It's also usually not appreciated that the language "subject to the jurisdiction" seems to apply to the child, not the parent. I actually think it would be reasonable to rule that if the child is born in the U.S., to alien parents and the alien parents and child immediately move back to their homeland while the child is a minor and the child is a citizen of the homeland, obviously the child is not a U.S. subject and do not get citizenship. However, if the parents illegally move to the United States and bear a child and the child never establishes any connection or loyalty to their homeland, once they reach the age of majority the child should be considered a citizen. This would be consistent with the Wong Kim Ark ruling which is that the child born in America and who is a permanent resident of America and primarily loyally to America is a citizen, even if they technically are claimed as citizen by another country by right of blood.
I read through the original Congressional debates about the ratification of the amendment and found them pretty interesting.
A key line is this one by Senator Howard who worked on the langauge of the bill and said:
[This amendment is] simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of person. It settles the great question and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.
Unfortunately, it did not remove all doubt because there is a question of whether there is an implicit "or" between "aliens" and "who belong to the families of ambassadors" or if the ", aliens, " is parenthetical and the 'who belong" is a modifier to foreigners/aliens.
Reading the rest of the debates does not perfectly resolve the issue either. One reason reading the debates does not perfectly resolve the issue is that they simply were not dealing with a problem of temporary visitors trying to gain a foothold in the country by having children. Back then, almost anyone rich enough to be an international tourist would have had no problem becoming a permanent US resident anyways. The wording of the Amendment was designed to unambiguously include freed slaves, but exclude unconquered American Indian tribes. That's why they chose the language they did. They were not thinking about anchor babies. One of the Senators opposed the amendment because it would include Gypsies and Chinese, and the other Senator replied that yes, it would, but that is ok, there are not enough of them to be a big deal. But in the case of the gypsies and Chinese, we are talking about groups that were domiciled in the U.S., and so that does not apply to temporary migrants, so that doesn't really help us.
Reading "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States as "potentially subject to prosecution in American courts according to American laws" does not make sense, because that is literally everyone in the world. Even diplomats are subject to American law, the U.S. just has a policy of expulsion rather than prosecution for crimes that are not violent felonies.
I think the best way to understand "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States", and the one most consistent with the Congressional debate, is that the person is an American subject. They are loyal to the American government, not a foreign government or sovereign tribal government. In the absence of any current legal definition, here are some to heuristics to judge if someone is an American subject: If they commit a medium severity crime, will they be deported to their home country? If a war came and there was a draft, they would be subject to the U.S. draft and not another country's draft? If they fought for the enemy and caught, they would be hung as a traitor instead of considered to be a prisoner of war to be exchanged? If they were in a third country and got in trouble or lost a passport, they would contact the American consulate, and the American State Department would help him out because the person was "one of theirs."? If they are working abroad, do they still owe an income tax return to the United States government?
If I was rewriting American immigration law, I would have only four categories:
- Temporary visas (business, tourist, etc.) -- less than 9 months, can be extended only with escalating penalties.
- Conditional residency visa -- indefinite based on good behavior, paying taxes, and meeting the initial conditions of the visa (eg, meeting some terms of sponsorship)
- American national - primary loyalty to the U.S., American passport, permanent residency, will not be deported for crimes. But no rights to vote, hold office, or sit on a jury. I would also any conditional resident to pledge loyalty to America and become an American national after 10 years.
- American citizen. I'd allow an American national to naturalize as a citizen after another 10 years.
The children born in the U.S.A. of American nationals would be citizens automatically. Children born to parents with conditional residency visas I would make citizens automatically if their parents become American nationals, otherwise they have the visa status of their parents.
dev
3mo ago
I have forgetten most of them and they're still rather cumbersome to refer back to.
I find a way to get an e-book copy of the things I read (Kindle, Anna's Archive, etc.) and I can often find a passage pretty quickly. I just need to be able to remember one or two key words from the passage in order to get the search correct.
dev
4mo ago
Unconscionable that some autistic kid who made very dumb decisions
He didn't make a dumb decision, he embezzled the customer funds into his own accounts and then gambled with them. It was straight up theft of billions of dollars.
should be sentenced to 25 years in jail, more than almost all violent criminals, rapists, homeless psychopaths and others who are an actual threat to civilized society.
If you believe various studies of how people value their own life, thefts of over $10 million should basically be considered the equivalent of murder.
whose victims didn’t even lose any money (even if some missed out on hypothetical gains) should be sentenced to 25 years in jail,
Hmmm:
Investigators discovered a “backdoor” encoded in FTX’s platform that allowed Alameda to withdraw customer funds from FTX without triggering any alarms in the company’s standard systems...Alameda’s risky trading practices were supported by access to client deposits, which were treated as a personal line of credit without the clients’ knowledge.....The plan provides a bonus over the original amount, so investors are expected to receive a refund of just over 25% of the value of their lost assets.
If I put 10 ounces of gold in a safe deposit box, and then the bank owner steals 5 ounces and loses it at a casino, but the price of gold triples, the bank still stole from me, even if the bank owner claims that I didn't lose any money since value of my assets are greater now than when I put them in the safe deposit box.
dev
6mo ago
Hard no.
- It would create much more incentive to assassinate a president since it would result in a complete switch in control of government.
- It would make the president a lot less likely to step aside if health or other reasons made it so he really should not continue as president (of course, presidents have not been good in the past at stepping aside, even when they really should and have someone of the same party in succession).
- The VP would be completely frozen out, putting him in a poor position to take the reins if something happened to the president. There would be no 'tard-wrangling' with each other, the VP would be entirely ignored and left doing absolutely nothing except collecting a pay check.
I would actually go the other way -- allow the President to fire the VP and replace him with any Senate-confirmed cabinet member, and take the Speaker of the House out of the line of succession. The problem with the VP now is that it is supposedly an apprenticeship for the president, but because the President cannot fire the VP the President is very wary of giving the VP any real responsibility. And if the Speaker of the House is in the line of succession, the President would never want to fire a VP because then the line of succession could be going to the other party.
Some years back I wrote a post related to this on Conspiracy Theories, Meme Theories, and Bureaucracy Theories. A lot of this hinges on what we mean by "intent" and the realization that an institution or a system can have an "intent" that is essentially different from both its stated intent, the intent of its designers, and even the intent of the people running it:
The "system is what it does" is a pithy condensation of this idea. It's true and useful rhetoric in a few ways:
UPDATE NOW THAT I'VE READ SCOTT:
The "system is what it is does" is most truthful and useful when you have a particular institution or complex that over-and-over gets results that are at odds with its stated goals. It's not an observation that is useful in all circumstances. For example, for the question of "what is the purpose of the Ukrainian army" we don't have enough repeated observations to really know if there is an underlying dynamic that is at odds with its stated goals.
Here is a good example: the purpose of the homelessness activist complex in SF is too maximize jobs for activists (not its stated goal of ending homelessenss)
Another: the purpose of academia is to convert grants into papers (not its stated goal of producing high-quality science)
Another: the purpose of police in big cities is to maintain the monopoly on violence. (Hence, why it seems that vigilantism by citizens is treated far more harshly than random assaults by randoms. Crime is only suppressed to prevent it from getting so bad that citizens might choose vigilantism despite the risks. Note, this thesis is not completely true, but it is more true than a naive "police only exist to reduce crime and any failure to do so is just due to normal human imperfection")
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