curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
TSMC has fabs in the US now?
TSMC Arizona's first fab started high-volume production of its N4 process technology in the fourth quarter of 2024
I don't think military tech uses latest-generation chips.
This isn't an area I have much knowledge in though.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
Ok I see, that was worded weirdly, and I should've clarified that, but this supports my main point that this ruling does nothing to prevent Trump from carrying out deportations in general
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
I think he could. You don't have to do the deportations this year. Trump has four years. Spend the first two building up the organization while doing smaller test runs, and then the last two years churning through deportations. If Trump made it his #1 priority, as you'd expect from the way the New Right frames the importance of demographic change, he could get a lot more funding for ICE, and could just hire a bunch of people. And he has many options for external manpower too - local police, red state governors, the national guard. Even the military is an option under the Insurrection Act.
There just aren't that many people who want that job.
Sure, but the US has 350 million people. Make it pay well and you'll find hundreds of thousands of takers.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
I don't understand the argument here. The thing you are paying for is the construction of those factories. And the factories for the inputs. This is expensive. But so are tariffs.
And you don't need to source literally all of the inputs (for instance the electronics) domestically. China is not the only country we can import inputs from. We have allies.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
It's gonna be tough, because they don't just have to be worried for their jobs, they have to be more worried for their jobs via general election than via primaries. It takes a lo to make primary voters disregard Trump saying 'THIS TRAITOR KILLED OUR BEAUTIFUL TARIFFS! VOTE HER OUT!'.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
This is one of the worst arguments for tariffs! If we want arms factories, we can just spend 1% of our GDP on arms factories, have some competent individual (I would've picked Elon a year ago but we've seen how that's gone) manage 'procurement' instead of the existing bureaucracies, and we'll have a ton of arms factories. We do not need to make shoes to make missiles.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
ICE lacks the manpower to actually deport millions of people
This is something Trump could fix if he was somewhat competent, or delegated the authority to someone competent. He isn't and hasn't though.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
Most people who are geniuses in one area are kind of mediocre in other areas. Trump's a genius at entertaining and getting votes, and he's terrible at economic policy. Why are those two particularly related?
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I re-read my comment and I don't think I implied otherwise?
Interesting article. Let's read it.
The big picture: The Trump administration fought a lower court order to return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian national who the government erroneously deported, arguing the judge's order imposes on the president's foreign policy powers.
Okay. "Erroneously deported". Maybe this is liberal media slander. Let's see where the link goes.
A Salvadorian national living in Maryland legally was wrongly deported to El Salvador, the Department of Justice has admitted in court papers filed Monday.
They admitted it? Maybe this is spin from the ... biased reporters at ... Axios? Well, let's click.
It's a filing by the government, defending their position. From the "Statement of Facts"
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia is a citizen and native of El Salvador, and his coplaintiffs are his U.S. citizen wife and five-year-old child, who reside in Maryland. Compl. ¶¶ 4–6, 42. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife work full-time to support their family.
During a bond hearing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) stated that a confidential informant had advised that Abrego Garcia was an active member of the criminal gang MS-13.
Although Abrego Garcia was found removable, the immigration judge granted him withholding of removal to El Salvador in an order dated October 10, 2019.
On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. Cerna Decl. ¶¶ 12–15. On March 16, a news article contained a photograph of individuals entering intake at CECOT.
Okay ... so he was protected from removal, and ICE should not have removed him and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.
And he was not merely "removed" to another country, but sent to a notorious prison for gang members, where it's unclear if he'll ever be able to leave. Due to an "administrative error". Without any due process to determine, for instance, whether he was actually a member of MS-13, whether this confidential informant's claims were true. When previously he was married to a US citizen and raising a five year old.
Let's read your second paragraph again:
Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.
What?
How did this sequence of thoughts occur to you?
Most illegal immigrants are not protected from removal. For those that are protected, there are ways to remove the protection, whether that be via executive orders (as trump has revoked TPS for many groups of illegal immigrants), laws (Republicans, in theory, have a trifecta, and could nuke the filibuster at any time for something of such great importance) or proceedings in courts. Even then, if the administration simply wanted him gone, they could have expelled this person to freedom in a foreign country, instead of a prison that El Salvador advertises as a hellish place you can never leave, and perhaps gotten a friendlier ruling.
The Trump Administration is not getting similar orders to return the over 275 other people sent to CECOT, because they weren't sent because of an "administrative error" like this one.
How does an order demanding this man return have anything at all to do with the ability of the Trump administration to deport illegal immigrants in general?
Woke tariffs are fantastically dumb and nobody should support them, but they’re probably only the second or third dumbest thing we’ve done to our economy this decade so far
This is only true if/because they're likely to be reversed quickly. If we kept these tariffs, including the 100% on China, on for six months, they'd be worse than the covid lockdowns.
curious_straight_ca
10d ago
Melatonin! Minimal side effects, since it's just your sleep hormone. from scott: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
What do you think looks good in the next 10 years?
Still AI, the market's still not pricing it in AGI
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
They really aren't. You could predict AI being a big deal much better by reading blogposts than looking at stock prices.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
Universal tariffs are words that fail the antagonism rule not a good policy fit for any reasonable goal. If you want a muscular government to intervene in the economy, actually do that. if you want to encourage manufacturing and defense production, if you want to downsize the parasitic financial economy, if you want good jobs for poor white Americans, if you want America to produce steel and ships (for shipping or the navy) and toasters and drones and nuclear power plants ... then actually do that. Subsidize specific industries. Do huge advance market commitments. Partner with a red state, eminent domain some land, rubber-stamp all the regulatory hurdles, and build those nuclear plants. Pick some startup CEO and replace the slow defense procurement process with "that guy decides". Ban imported Chinese products that infringe on domestic IP. Implement a 50% tax on hedge fund profits. Do the Yarvin where you just ban mass-produced shoes and clothing. Whatever. Those are the kind of policies that could, in principle, do the thing you want them to. One of them might even actually be a good idea. But there's an actual connection between the goal and the action, unlike with universal tariffs.
The fundamental principle behind universal tariffs is "We need to do something. This is something [we can do]. Therefore, we need do this". Way in the past, when we didn't have computers or even telegraphs and governments were less powerful, tax collection was just a lot harder, and trade with foreign countries necessarily occurred at borders and especially ports, so tariffs were the government's biggest source of revenue, so the concept of tariffs got a lot of mindshare. Later, US Congress delegated tariff power to the President as a way to negotiate trade agreements after they passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and caused a trade war. So the right's thinking about it because we did it in the based old days, and Trump's thinking about it because it's a thing he can do without needing Congress. And, if you think about it a little, there are arguments for why it'd bring manufacturing back and increase lower class wages and such, it doesn't sound that implausible. (There are arguments for a lot of things.) So, in an intellectual environment where ideas aren't exactly rigorously scrutinized, "tariff everything" does very well.
(Or, Trump got a big beautiful red button that makes everyone, especially the libs, mad when he presses it. Of course he'll press it. Why reach for a more complicated explanation?)
The thing is, the 100 year old rusty tool you found in your grandfather's toolbox isn't the best choice to fix your Tesla, or your modern economy. If you're hoping the 50% tariffs on Vietnam will bring back those jobs for working class Americans, wages and gdp per capita there are less than a tenth of America's, and 1.5 is a lot less than 10. It'll make a difference on the margin, but it won't make Americans start buying clothing made of American cloth and put together by American hands. Universal tariffs are too blunt an instrument - tariffs large enough to actually bring all the jobs back would crush the economy, because it's currently deeply integrated with the outside world. And bringing back manufacturing wouldn't even bring back manufacturing employment. Americans don't want to work for Vietnam wages, but American robots will happily work at a total cost above Vietnam wages but below American wages.
"Yes-chad", I might say to all that. Yes, I want to destroy the degenerate, consumerist, metastasized economy. Yes, I don't want cheap garbage from foreign countries. America needs harsh medicine.
Even in that case, universal tariffs still aren't the right tool. If you want such radical change, you either need buy-in from the population because of the "democracy" thing, or something like regime change. In the former case, crashing the stock market and raising prices for the garbage everyone loves just doesn't sell! Peoples' jobs depend on particular economic arrangements, companies with specific suppliers and specific markets, and in current_year many of those suppliers and markets are in foreign countries, so huge universal tariffs that last for years means a lot of people will lose their jobs. People generally don't like that. Maybe with careful state management of a transition to something closer to autarky, people could be convinced. But universal tariffs don't do that, they're a sudden shock.
So, regime change. The thing about regime change is you need a lot more support than you do to do things through the normal democratic process. Often but not necessarily from the masses, but certainly from some people. Universal tariffs destroys elite buy-in, because you're nuking their stocks and businesses. It's the kind of thing you need to do after the coup, not before it. And once you get to absolute public policy, you can hopefully more directly pursue your desired outcome.
Targeted tariffs aren't as dumb as universal tariffs. America really should make chips, and ships, in America. But if even the Jones Act isn't enough to make America build American ships, moderate tariffs probably won't be either.
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
Your bias is showing
I'm very right-wing! I might be biased against Trump (I don't think so), but I'm definitely not biased against right wing policies.
Biden's DOJ went after J6'ers so hard they got thrown in solitary confinement and had exculpating evidence hid from trial because apparently the security footage proving their innocence was a "state secret".
Link? I was unable to find anything like this from google searches like "january 6 evidence prosecution state secret".
Biden's regulatory apparatus would randomly exterminate American businesses left and right. Happened to Juul, crypto, energy sectors, etc
Crypto is basically a combination of regulatory arbitrage for moderately more efficient finance and an unregulated trillion dollar global casino. I don't think the Biden admin's regulation on crypto made sense, but it's difficult to argue against harsh regulation.
Biden did not exterminate the energy sector. As Matt Yglesias always says, US oil production hit all-time highs under Biden. And that's despite the dumb lockdowns.
The Juul ban was probably dumb, but that doesn't seem out of distribution for dumb things every administration does, either in terms of competence or overall impact.
To say nothing of the countless red lines Biden put on the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Palestine conflict that just got blown right past to no consequence what so ever.
Again, this isn't ideal, but Trump's foreign policy (for example claims of annexing Gaza) is hardly consistent either. It's not out of distribution. Telling Canadian leaders in a private call that you want to renegotiate the treaty about our border ... is. That's the kind of thing that I said above - it's out-of-distribution retarded, even though the impact is minor.
Talking about classified intel, does nobody else remember the leaks of classified info on Discord during the Biden admin
Random people leak things sometimes. There are millions of people with access to classified info. That doesn't really implicate the Biden admin's decisionmaking, unlike this.
Their fucking AWOL secretary of defense was just as retarded when he vanished for months while WWIII was breaking out, telling nobody
... vanished for months? I only remember a 'disappearance' of few days for an operation, and a few more announced operations later. I googled for it and can't find anything about months. That wasn't great, but you may be overstating it.
(And having a DEI hire who is at least an experienced military commander who's gone for a few days, while suboptimal is better than someone whose possession of the job is entirely counterfactual to being a fox news host).
So your examples aren't persuasive. None of them are anywhere near 'sending innocent people to a jail in El Salvador without due process, while intentionally ambiguously violating a court order' and 'being so incompetent that you have lower standards than El Salvador, who sent back women (it's a men's only prison, somehow they didn't know that) and a Nicaraguan (because it'd be a disaster for them to randomly imprison a citizen of a neighboring country).' Which, as acknowledged above, doesn't matter at all in the greater scheme of things - but it's incredibly stupid.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
This is clearly just against the positive value of free speech. Arresting or deporting people for expressing political opinions makes people less willing to share political opinions. Whether or not the First Amendment allows it isn't the main point. It's bad because of the same core logic that makes it bad for us to ban all nazis or leftists, even if both are evil.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
I'm sure you've all heard it before but anyone who smokes should switch to vaping, it has like 1/100th of the health consequences for the same benefit.
(Also a bit selfish, I also despise cigarette smoke)
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
But especially for children this doesn’t make sense. Kids are impressionable, they tend to believe and accept what adults tell them
Yeah, this is the key. And it's not just that kids will believe facts you tell them, they'll absorb anything, often randomly, from their surroundings. Show someone ballet on TV? Maybe the kid (usually a girl, but sometimes a boy), will want to do ballet. I know someone who wore skirts for a few years around age 12, just because they said they wanted to and their parents didn't care. (It wasn't even associated with anything else gender-related, they were otherwise typically male). Raise a child on an isolated farm somewhere, appearing to genuinely claim that Zeus is a real god of thunder you worship and do rituals around, and there's a good chance they'll have spiritual experiences about the reality of Zeus. Of course if trans is a thing that kids read about, some kids will decide they're trans for no particularly strong reason.
I think the social contagion-ness of trans is definitely true, but bit overstated - at least in MtFs, it's also tapping into a very real tendency that exists independently of the contagion.
Something that more centrally embodies social contagion theory imo are eating disorders among teenage girls. Zack M Davis pretty persuasively explained how he had urges clearly identifiable as transgender, or as he'd describe it AGP, a while before he had any idea what transgender was. But just by searching #edtwt on twitter and browsing for a while, I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that this would almost disappear without the social factor. I find it insane that twitter will ban saying 'kill yourself', but not this.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?
If you're going to add a random person to a chat, it's going to be a random person in your contacts list. And people in politics talk to journalists a lot. Odds seem pretty high imo!
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
They already do make all the decisions. Democracy just frequently changes which group of elites chooses the experts make the decisions.
The problem for your friend's question is, what's his better way to choose the elites who choose the experts? And how do you give that group power? The elites could just choose a next group of elites, but I don't really want mad king Elon. Probably there's a group of capable leaders who, if chosen to be absolute rulers, would do a lot better than democracy. Look at how advocating for monarchy has gone for Moldbug - he's been reduced to asking the Trump admin to do the coup. I don't want Trump, or Elon, or a coalition of right-wing power brokers including Trump Jr and Tucker, to choose the next king, personally.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
This reflects more on the particular kinds of stories they were telling than it does on history as a whole. Having a (relatively, for a woman) strong wife who can do farm labor and bear strong sons was valued. A female relative of mine who still lives off the same farm her grandparents did is visibly pretty strong.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
He's still coping in that essay. If he was truly thinking rationally (which doesn't have any special meaning beyond thinking well, really), differences in height and muscle mass alone should've been enough to make him deeply question that hypothesis, and then a single search in google scholar or about men and women playing sports against each other would put the question to bed. He wasn't really being isolated from evidence by his environment, or making reasonable conclusions from evidence, he was believing it because it'd be sexist and rude not to.
(The same is true, although less obviously so, about "intelligence" being a real thing that varies a lot between individuals. It's still amazing to me how many very smart people deny it.)
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.
I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.
No need for the 'without', I did say that.
Most of the manufacturing needed for defense isn't chips though. And the chips point goes both ways - if it's that hard to relocate, tariffs aren't going to do it either
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