sockpuppet2
10d ago
It'd be interesting to compare the cost-effectiveness of USAID's reduction in pathogens brought to the US and quarantining all international travelers and cargo ships, including economic impact, but the counterfactual in the comment you replied to was "phase-out," not indefinite continuation.
Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.
Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.
sockpuppet2
11d ago
They had hours and hours of high school-level training videos on government functions, so hopefully they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic understanding of government to staff the entire administrative state (even after cuts), because the alternative is that they didn't think they could find enough conservatives with a basic level of government for just the "higher-level positions, where such vetting has happened by ~every administration except Trump I." (On the other hand, Rick Perry didn't know what the Department of Energy did, both when he ran on eliminating it or when he was asked to be its Secretary, so the latter is possible...)
sockpuppet2
11d ago
Yeah, I was already going to pass on that - Metallica deserved their fifteen minutes of fame... but only those fifteen minutes. I'm looking forward to hearing "Mistrial" and "New York," though, since "New Sensations" was remarkably strong, 12 years after his debut albums.
sockpuppet2
11d ago
Perhaps imposed is the wrong word. Merely "pushed". Elites promoted the degenerate belief system in, i.e., universities and media, while not actually practicing it themselves.
Do you draw a distinction between "Elites promoted the degenerate belief system" and "Elites questioned the assumption that the belief system was degenerate?" Is it normal to practice all things one thinks should be less stigmatized than they presently are?
I'm kind of surprised you've never heard this if you visit this forum regularly.
Motters throw around phrases like "degenerate belief system" too much to infer what belief system they're referring to.
sockpuppet2
11d ago
Lou Reed was ridiculously consistent in his quality as a songwriter. "Metal Machine Music" was experimental and "The Bells" was lower quality, but other than those two albums, every song through 1984 (I haven't yet listened past then) was at least pretty damned good.
sockpuppet2
11d ago
The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.
What's the degenerate belief system, how was it imposed, and what resources are needed to overcome it?
sockpuppet2
12d ago
Any good info on post-Musk twitter recruiting?
sockpuppet2
12d ago
Given how low-level the P25 training videos I watched were, I didn't take them seriously.
sockpuppet2
12d ago
Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:
It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.
This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.
This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).
This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.
sockpuppet2
12d ago
It seems foreseeable, to me.
sockpuppet2
13d ago
This is roughly $3K per person for STI testing and treatment. Why?
Maybe it includes the opportunity cost of not providing other services.
sockpuppet2
13d ago
But the question is what the grant was for. Youth groups and drag shows don't cost $6.3 million.
sockpuppet2
13d ago
Reuters: Health clinics grapple with US funding squeeze
It seems funding hasn't been fully restored and a lot of affected clinics don't have sufficient cash reserves:
Three community health centers near Richmond, Virginia, were forced to shut down after federal funds used to pay staff salaries remained inaccessible since last week, said Virginia Community Healthcare Association spokesperson Joe Stevens.
As of Friday, another nine centers across Virginia also could not access federal funds but continued to see patients by tapping into reserve funds.
"They will need money in the next week," said Stevens. "We don't know why some centers can access funds and some cannot."
In Virginia, community health centers provide medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmaceutical and substance use services for approximately 400,000 patients. For much of the state's rural areas, the centers are the only option for primary care, said Stevens.
One center that was still unable to access federal funds is in southwestern Virginia, where the next closest option for medical care is more than an hour's drive, he said. Most providers were able to access Medicaid and grant monies once the spending freeze was rescinded. However, some say they are still cut off from payments used for essential care, including medical, dental, prescription drugs and behavioral health.
And, of course, problems with transgender-serving clinics and federal grants for STI prevention and treatment:
Late last week, some healthcare centers that provide HIV prevention services and care for transgender patients received notices that grants issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be terminated. The letters cited the Trump administration's orders on diversity and gender identity, according to three recipients of the notices.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention referred questions about the grants to the Department of Health and Human Services.
St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a network of public health centers in South and Central Los Angeles, cannot access $746,000 remaining from a $1.6 million grant used to provide prevention, testing and treatment for about 500 transgender people at risk of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.
"We have made a decision not to cut back any programs because of any threats from the federal government," said St. John's President Jim Mangia.
St. John's has joined a lawsuit filed by California's attorney general contesting the funding cuts. Mangia says he will seek private funding to make up the loss.
The LGBT Life Center in Norfolk, Virginia, received a letter stating $6.3 million of the organization’s funding, or 48% of its annual budget, would be terminated, said spokesperson Corey Mohr. The center provides medication and monitoring to 400 patients with HIV.
I'm curious what the LGBT Life Center's grant was for, given that St. John's had 25% more patients. Maybe it was specific to HIV-positive patients and treatment is genuinely more expensive than prevention? But I had thought PrEP, PEP, and ART were the same medication at different doses, and that progression of HIV to AIDS is very uncommon, so that wouldn't make much sense.
sockpuppet2
13d ago
Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?
Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:
As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,
You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.
Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.
This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.
This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?
Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.
Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.
The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.
sockpuppet2
14d ago
I don't see anything dysphemistic about it. The moderators theoretically being able to defy him doesn't detract from the fact that he wanted to cut himself off from certain opinions, some of which he held and holds himself.
What would Scott have had to do to avoid being perceived as illiberal?
sockpuppet2
14d ago
Can you see a physical therapist? They'd be the experts on what would help or hurt.
sockpuppet2
14d ago
Where do I go from here? I had an xray done - nothing was found.
What did the doctor who ordered the x-ray advise?
sockpuppet2
15d ago
"Scott kicked us out" seems like a dysphemistic way to describe (presumably characteristically nicely) asking the moderators of an independent subreddit named after his blog to stop doing something in association with that name, making this a bit "no true liberal." The top level comment was Is liberalism dying? Scott changed his life to be more liberal online, so, if anything, his online conduct is a pro-liberal trend.
sockpuppet2
15d ago
If the Nibblonians send Old Man Waterfall back in time to become its AG.
sockpuppet2
15d ago
I couldn’t tell if @sockpuppet2 was upset that I was understating it or was setting me up for some sort of gotcha.
Neither, I was just curious how you classified disasters, since "moderate disaster" is a weird combination of words.
sockpuppet2
15d ago
Well, how many deaths constitutes a "major disaster?"
sockpuppet2
15d ago
Good point - me only including the medical meaning was myopic. But, if anything, the multiple meanings of the suffix and the imprecision of the latter meaning underscores the problem with the "Muskian" use of "telepathy" to describe... whatever this is.
sockpuppet2
15d ago
Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021 when that infrastructure groaned under winter weather.
What's the dividing line between a "moderate disaster" and a "major" disaster? Your link says 246 deaths - 246 out of the ~25 million ERCOT customers dying is a small percentage of customers dying... but that's just the number of customers who suffered the worst measurable consequence, not the cumulative damage caused attributable to the outage.
Can you give examples of past attempts? As a cynic, it wouldn't surprise me, but this is The Motte, not The Bailey, so I don't want to assume that what wouldn't surprise cynical, old me is correct.
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