quiet_NaN
11hr ago
Here is my heuristic: if Trump is promising the American people the Moon, he can safely be ignored. (Excepting Ghislaine Maxwell, whose quality of life he really did improve substantially.) If he promises to attack his enemies, then he can be expected to at least make a good faith effort to do so, consequences be damned.
How well the latter will work depends a lot on the specifics. His progress on defeating free trade is rather impressive (though I think there is still a court decision pending if he had the authority to enact tariffs on that scale). Directing his AG to attack his enemies has mostly been meh, because he does not do a good job of convincing the courts. Getting rid of illegals and/or Hispanics is something where he is actually making progress due to his willingness to spend a ton of taxpayer money to have his goons deport school girls. Sending the national guard to cities to punish them for voting against him is more meh, for the most part he is making the liberals mildly uncomfortable.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
Pardons are, for better or worse, a topic in the realm of criminal procedure in that they decide if someone will go to prison or not. I think it is reasonable that the standard for forged pardons applied is the same as for other criminal evidence.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
I will note that some people (e.g. Eliezer) predict that ASI will indeed drastically reduce socioeconomic inequality between humans. Just not in a good way.
In case alignment is as simple as the billionaires believe, I guess that the median AI billionaire will probably be willing to yield half a steradian of the light cone to the rest of us, which would still imply an enormous quality of life increase over our present state.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The lack of smart phones is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes the 1950s dreadful. There is a lot more tech which has made live more bearable since these days. Medicine is a big one, dying of something which we could cure in 2025 will severely impact your QoL. Social techs are another, unless his daughter wants to be a tradwife, I think it highly unlikely that raised on SJP (like everyone is, to some degree), she will appreciate the roles which 1959 can offer to her. For me personally, even the idea of going back to an age where indoor smoking in public buildings was normal would be a hard no. The ability to own property in a somewhat desirable location without being a millionaire would be nice, though.
Unlike in South Park, there is no immigration to the past or future or exchange of goods with other times in the real world. Inflation is typically tied to a basket of reference consumer goods, and there is certainly some leeway in what you consider equivalent.
On reflection, I think that the utility of having 12.5$ in 1959 is dwarfed by the requirement of having to live in that time. Another consideration would be to simply ask "would you rather have invested 12.5k$ in 1959 or 100k$ in 2025?" That one is not even worth debating, because the stock market has increased 60fold since then.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Are there any cases where this has been established beyond reasonable doubt?
I would consider even a short verbal exchange ("Mr President, we have another ten pardons ... " -- "Just sign the damn things!") to be sufficient that the president had granted approval.
So the only cases where the non-involvement of the president could be established beyond reasonable doubt would be either with a staffer confessing or them bragging in writing about being able to bypass Biden.
Given Trump's history of outrageous claims on little to no evidence going back to Birtherism, I would be very surprised if he had any evidence which would convince a jury, rather than just blabbering.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Here are some things which Democrats could do to escalate maximally once they have the presidency:
- Have spooks murder anyone associated with the Trump administration.
- Establish a dictatorship, outlaw the Republican party, sending any Republicans to gitmo.
- Bomb neighborhoods which voted overwhelmingly for MAGA.
- Deprive white unmarried men of the franchise.
This is just from two minutes brainstorming, there is likely more.
My best guess is that the Democrats will do none of the above, and the things which they will do will generally be less escalating than the stuff on this list. Sure, they will go through any pardon given to Trump's allies and read the fine print, searching for any offenses which are not covered by the pardon. And they will certainly overturn many of Trump's EOs, just as Trump is overturning many of Biden's EOs.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
There is a vast gulf between executive orders and pardons.
With EOs, he can just sign another EO declaring the first one void. Just tweeting about it is not enough, though.
My guess is that at least half of the EOs are probably non-partisan stuff which most presidents would generally want to keep, and just getting rid of all of them will be unpopular, but if each president was willing to have their staff go through all the current EOs and evaluate them, that would sound beneficial.
Pardons can not be reverted, it would defeat their whole point. Now, if a criminal had personally conspired with White House staff to get a pardon without the president noticing, forging his signature etc, then my guess is that the courts would indeed declare such a pardon void.
But in any cases where the beneficiary of the pardon did not obviously illegally conspire on his own behalf, I think it would be generally beneficial to let the pardon stand, rather than creating a situation where pardons no longer offer legal certainty.
Also, Biden's broadest pardon scandalously benefits Hunter Biden. The persons inside the WH who had any interest in pardoning Hunter are Biden and his wife, not anonymous staff who were running his administration.
Finally, Trump is a master of wielding pardons as a political tool. One might be excused to think that he would have the sense to avoid establishing any precendent where pardons are declared null and void.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Is Trump, strictly speaking, in the chain of causality which caused the national guards to be shot? Without a doubt.
Does this mean that he is legally or morally responsible? Hell no.
Personally, I am of the opinion that his deployment of the national guard is a waste of taxpayer money. But I do not generally want politicians to make decisions based on how some crazies might react, because that would yield a lot of power to the crazies.
Some crazies see gay night clubs as a provocation which drives them to murder. Others are similarly enraged by national guard deployments. Luckily, the crazies are few and far between, so the optimal strategy is to bury the dead and not yield an inch policy-wise.
Now, if he had ordered the national guard to parachute over Kabul, or if a troop of national guardsmen had opened fire on civilians in DC, then I would lay the dead at Trump's feet, because causalities in battle deployments and excessive force are both outcomes which I want politicians to consider (which does not mean that their risk is never worth it, obviously).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?
So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?
Personally, I think the loyalty of a population is earned, not given. Citizens of the US or modern Germany should display some loyalty to their government because it represents an equilibrium which has a higher utility than any other equilibrium they are likely to establish working against the government.
By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so. Nor were the exile Germans who aided the Allies betraying Germany, because even with the Soviets, Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.
The real world is not Civilization where governments change but annexation is forever.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.
This sounds like a cope. I am certain that allying with child-fucking warlords did not help win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but I also think that the eventual outcome was overdetermined the minute W invaded. Even if the US had made a point of murdering every alleged boy-fucker on the spot, the fact remains that few Afghans preferred freedom and democracy to the point where they were willing to die for it, while plenty were willing to die for the Taliban cause.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Potato, potato. As Bierce observes,
There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another
I will grant you that killing in self-defense is meaningfully different from murder.
I might even grant you that there is sometimes a difference between killing out of murderism and accepting killing someone as an acceptable side effect in pursuit of another goal.
But I have read enough Tucholsky to reject the premise that murder dressed in uniform ceases to be murder.
If the US navy is shooting boats of suspected drug smugglers in international waters near Venezuela, arguing about the difference of that and what is generally understood to be murder is splitting hairs.
Directionally, what Obama did to Bin Laden seems to be mostly the same thing, at least based on my priors. Could be that he forced the hands of the US troops when they were trying to take him into custody, and could be that he was on the verge of giving the order for 9/11 2.0, which is why they had to storm his compound right away, but likely the US just decided that it would not bother with a trial.
Again, least upsetting murder committed by the US ever, though.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him.
To nitpick, I have stated the sentiment that I would celebrate if a public figure died of natural causes and not gotten a warning for it.
While neither is a nice sentiment, I think there is a clear distinction between the wishing for someone to die and wishing for them to get murdered. One is poor taste and possibly makes me a terrible human being, but the other is calling for or condoning violence, which has a corrosive effect on civilization.
To further complicate matters, there are certainly cases where homicides are widely celebrated. The death of Bin Laden has been widely celebrated, for example. (Yes, you can argue that Obama's SEALs were doing their utmost to bring him in alive to stand trial in NY, and he somehow thwarted them by presenting a clear and present danger, so they had to abandon their objective and kill him (so the public would not be celebrating a murder but a killing in self defense), but given the general US policy of drone strikes against individuals suspected of terrorism, I think it much more likely that they fulfilled their objective. -- Personally, I would have liked to see him stand trial, but of all the deaths from W's war on terror, his is certainly in the lowest percentile of upsettingness.)
So empirically, it seems to depend on the victim if a homicide can be praised or not, at which point we are mostly haggling over price.
I am not saying that people should be able to call for the murder of anyone (and I do not think there is a CW topic whose outcome could be improved by murder, actually), I am just stating my opinion that it is hard to make hard and fast rules about these things.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
This is the first thing which makes me, if not exactly sympathetic to Trump, then at least unsympathetic to Comey.
Criminal procedure exists for a reason. There are plenty of jobs in the world where you can do just fine by sometimes taking shortcuts instead of doing everything by the book. Criminal investigations is not one of them. If you find yourself lying to a judge so that they will bless you violating someones constitutional rights, or engaging in parallel construction, then you are the villain. If you can't do your job while keeping within the law, then at least be honest, quit your job, wear a batman mask and beat up suspects in the night, don't pretend to serve the law while breaking it.
Sure, Trump going after you is roughly orthogonal to you having acted in a criminal manner, and this very much does not scale to a systemic solution, but if your allegations are true then I would consider a conviction at least a happy accident, like a bolt of lightning striking a serial killer.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that there is a vast gulf between people voting as representatives and people voting on the base.
Secret elections are obviously better at establishing common knowledge of what the base actually wants.
But for a representative, it is more important that they be accountable to their electorate. If 3/4th of the senate vote for something deeply unpopular, you do not want every senator to be able to tell his voters "no, I totally voted against this. It was all the other lying senators to vote for it."
For important personnel decisions (where there may be a lot of pressure to vote a particular way), the fix would be not to have representatives vote but just let the base vote. In secret, obviously.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
While I am sure that the woke left punishes defectors who cooperate with Trump, it is team MAGA which has perfected using administrative decisions to go after the people who were in the past on the wrong side. I vaguely recall law firms (who by design are mercenary) who had represented people who were litigating against Trump finding themselves without security clearance at the start of the year (or at least having to do an extraordinary amount of ass-kissing to keep them).
Political retaliation is bad no matter who does it. But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground. By contrast, if there was a billionaire who was as firmly committed to opposing Trump as Musk was opposed to the Democrats, I would totally expect Trump to do his best to destroy any companies where that billionaire holds significant stock.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The argument that IQ is measurable while morality is not, is just a case of looking for your keys under the streetlight. Pay attention to the race of criminals, but ignore Epstein and Weinstein, ignore the ethnicity of the Bolsheviks and the cultural Marxists, etc.
You forgot to mention them urging Pilate to have Jesus crucified.
The Soviets mostly were not Jewish. I have not heard the claim that Jewish Soviet officials were especially heinous, statistically speaking.
Epstein and Weinstein were, first and foremost, rich bastards. I do not think that once you control for "being a high society member" or "being a Hollywood exec" (which is well explained by HBD on intelligence), there is anything left to indicate that Jewish men have a higher incidence of sex pestery than gentiles.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I do not think that Merkel was that cynical. Also, she reigned for 16 years, most of them before she made the decision to let in refugees in 2015.
The Iraq war was unpopular in Germany from the get-go, and was certainly a reason why Schroeder (whose SPD is a very established party, btw) won one election with the promise not to take part in that adventure.
And Merz would gladly personally drown any number of refugees in the Mediterranean sea if it would increase his popularity.
The CDU today is not in a better position than they were ca 2014. So they would have to have been clever enough to make a 5d chess move (and under their own name, no less, instead of letting the SPD win an election and take the full blame for opening the borders), but stupid enough not to anticipate the outcome.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.
Basically, yes. When Christianity took over as the state religion in early medieval states, it was not a very tolerant religion. They did not suffer a follower of Freyja or Jupiter to live. Or an atheist, for that matter. Jews were the only religious outgroup which Christians did not feel the need to kill wherever they encountered them (but only on special occasions or when feeling especially holy).
(I think the Druids specifically were already on the shitlist of the (somewhat more religiously tolerant) Romans, possibly due to human sacrifices. Or that might be Roman propaganda.)
quiet_NaN
10d ago
While the Democrats were hinting extremely obviously that the military / intelligence community should basically pull off a coup,
From the context, I do not think that follows. There are plenty of situations where the correct response is just to say "No sir, I will not do that", without trying to dispose whoever gave the unlawful order.
Personally, I think the winning strategy for the Democrats is to wait Trump out. Time works for them. Few economists think that his tariffs will lead to economic success, the mid-terms are coming up, and without a majority in Congress MAGA will be much more limited in what they can do.
Sure, he will blow up more boats in the meanwhile, but blowing brown people up without a declaration of war has been a hobby of all presidents in this century so far, nobody really cares. And while sending his troops into cities which voted for Harris and deporting school students is not good, in the great scheme of things it is also not sufficient reason to end the American experiment with democracy. Established, traditional politicians are doing okay under the present system, and are hopefully reluctant to overthrow everything. I sincerely hope that most Democrats are smart enough to understand that a one-time surgical breaking of the constitution to get rid of Trump followed by business as usual will not work.
I am a bit more worried about the MAGA crowd, though. They are not your traditional Republicans who have thrived under the status quo for generations. Trump is certainly spending a lot more effort on placing loyal officers in charge than he was in his first term. One man's coup-proofing is another man's coup preparation. Frankly speaking, the Trump crowd has no regard for mos maiorum, for how things are done in politics, and while the chances that GWB would pull a Gracchi and run for a third term were basically nil, with Trump all things are possible.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
This is downstream of the orders actually being legal. Saying that X is illegal and therefore troops should refuse to do X depends a lot ob X.
With this touching the 1A, I also suppose that courts might allow you to say so if "X is illegal" is a defendable legal position. For example, one might have voiced the opinion that waterboarding is torture and US troops are required to refuse to engage in it, and even as the courts decided that nah, gitmo was just fine, they might presumably still refuse to convict you under that title. (I dunno, there is probably case law here.)
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers.
I am not sure that is entirely true.
First off, men are doing more than one kind of plowing. A man can easily father a couple of dozen children, but feeding them is a very different matter. Per acoup, a lot of ancient societies did not maximize their reproduction rate (mostly by delaying the marriage of women). To outcompete other societies, you do not want to make more babies than them, but more adults.
Secondly, if you live in times where you can lose 30% of a generation to warfare, you probably can not afford a 30% short time reduction in your capability to wage war. In the first system of warfare, your ability to inflict costs on other tribes in the area will determine what areas and resources you have access to.
Today, the requirement for strong people to plow the fields in back-breaking manual labor so that your population does not starve is mostly gone, but also, most countries care about other things than just how many warm bodies they house. While there are certainly plenty of women working careers which are essential to keep a country running, I think that men generally do their fair share of economic labor. Cut out a big chunk of the workforce, and times will be bad.
I think that the preference for men doing soldiering historically comes down to the fact that humans with high T used to make much more effective soldiers than humans with low T. If things were the opposite way, and the median woman had twice the weight and three times the strength of the median man, then your heavy infantry would have been basically women only, with men perhaps serving as skirmishers. The main reason few ancient societies sent their women into battle is the same why they did not send their 12yo boys into battle -- it is simply not the competitive advantage of that demographic, generally.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Typically, with the car mechanic, the deal is that you agree on a certain amount for diagnosing, and perhaps give them a certain budget for fixing stuff. If things get more expensive, they call you so you can make an informed decision.
Also, I do not see the benefit of making people pay the actual costs of their procedure instead of the expected costs as estimated beforehand.
So, if you want to find a hospital to give birth, different hospitals could make you offers based on your health conditions and date. If they estimate that there is a 10% probability that you will need an emergency C-section, they can just add 10% of the cost of one to the offer.
This would also align incentives way better, because the hospital would only do emergency C-sections if otherwise they would run into malpractice territory. By contrast, if the hospital can just bill the additional costs to the patient, their incentives are to to an 'emergency' C-section at the first sign of troubles and then make the poor schmuck pay for it. 99% of patients will not litigate the overenthusiastic indication, and the ones that do will be dirt cheap to settle because apart from the costs of the operation, there is little in the way of damages. A scar over your abdomen might be worth a few thousand dollars, but that is basically nothing compared to a child which was oxygen deprived during birth.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Tear down the entire economy to cull the health insurance industry
Random thought: just make it legal for veterinarians to treat consenting humans. Give them immunity for malpractice for anything below gross negligence -- if you want to get a million dollar payout by convincing a jury that a doctor treated you wrong, you should have gone to a hooman hospital. As a bonus, vets are a lot less squeamish about MAID.
Alternatively, disallow health providers from price discriminating. If you bill one insurer X$ for a head CT, you better not charge any other patients more for the same procedure.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
For small values of significant. As a toy model, let us assume a daily commute of half an hour. Say 50% of the time, you are hampered by traffic and traffic lights from going faster. The other 50% is spent in situations where you could save time by speeding.
Let us say that you go twice the speed limit when speeding. This is breakneck speed, public menace level. Instead of going 50km/h in residential neighborhoods, you go 100km/h. Instead of going 100km/h on two way traffic roads, you go 200km/h. By risking your life and everyone else's, you save a whopping 25% of your commute time, or 7.5 minutes. Of course, for every second saved you will also spend a second in high concentration ready to slam the brakes at the slightest trouble ahead, knowing that every 50ms in reaction delay will make it even more likely that you will kill someone.
Now, there are certainly examples where going faster will save you substantial time. "It is 3am, I am at a highway junction in Munich and want to get to a highway junction in Berlin." Sure, going 280km/h will save you about half the time compared to a more leisurely pace of 140km/h (if there are no construction sites which will bottleneck your time, and you ignore speed limits meant to cut down nighttime noise). But for the average road trip, the time saved just is not all that big.
As another intuition pump, consider ambulances. Clearly, getting a patient into the hospital as soon as possible after an accident is beneficial, and this is why we allow them to turn on their siren and run red lights. So we want them to be reasonably fast. An ambulance capped at 70km/h would be comically slow. But once you get to 160km/h or something, you quickly hit the point of diminishing returns in most scenarios. I am sure it would be technically feasible to build an ambulance with a top speed of 300km/h, but nobody wants that, because the scenarios where the maximum expected utility would require an ambulance to go that fast are very rare indeed.
Even if president Newsom (or whomever) will have such ambitions, I think the SCOTUS will not like him banning the Republicans, and the army will likely not obey his orders to occupy the SCOTUS.
Also, given the context, I think the Nuremberg trials were rather fair. Some Nazis were actually acquitted, and a few more only received prison sentences (and were quickly released once the 'newly democratized' Germans took over).
If the Democrats released a statement to the effect that they considered the attacks on suspect civilians which the US navy had just shipwrecked by missile strike a war crime, and were going to send the whole chain of command to the Hague (e.g. the spiritual successor to the Nuremberg trials) to answer for it, I would actually applaud that. (Sadly, this is not going to happen, because a military which will follow the orders of the president without hesitation is useful to whomever is the president.)
Most successful Democratic politicians are not terminally stupid. Unlike the (mostly newcomer) MAGA crowd, they have long thrived under the present political system. Anyone who has heard of the French and Russian revolutions knows that it is impossible to coordinate around "let us use violence (or other dirty tricks) to get rid of the outgroup, but then forsake dirty tricks and play fair among ourselves". If moderate Democrats (think Hillary) coordinate with DSA and commies to get rid of the Republicans, the next act in the play will inevitably be SJ Democrats and the far left coordinating to get rid of the moderates. Russia and the USSR are/were in fact one-party systems where elections do little to influence policy. The skillset to thrive in such a system is likely very different from the skillset required to win primaries.
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