anon_
3hr ago
Right, so this boils down too: I should be mad that we didn’t pull the trigger first.
Implicit in being mad that we didn’t pull the trigger first is the judgment that the action was good in itself.
anon_
1d ago
You can blow up Osama Bin Laden and there's basically no effect. Al Qaeda trundles on, they're still doing their thing.
This seems factually untrue. Over the GWOT the US dismantled Al Qaeda and related groups to the extent that they seemed unable to mount meaningful strikes against the US afterwards.
anon_
1d ago
What this does say is, Qatar has joined the ranks of countries that have no true sovereignty, and can be bombed at will by capable powers.
They already were. Maybe before now they could put on airs and pretend it wasn't so.
Under what circumstances would you feel that a foreign drone strike targeting a terrorist living or operating in the United States was justified and acceptable?
In what sense would I be mad that a foreign terrorist that was operating on our soil is disintegrated? That we didn't get the pull the trigger first? What national interest of mine does that foreigner serve?
In an even larger sense, terrorists from country A operating against country B while hiding out in country C are putting the citizens of C in danger to further their own ends in the A/B conflict. Unless C has a specific interest in that conflict, they only lose by their presence.
[ Of course, if the target(s) were factually innocent of terrorism or were too unimportant to be really culpable, that would be a different matter. But that obviously doesn't apply to this situation in which we all know with certainty that Hamas are culpable here. ]
anon_
3d ago
No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.
Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.
anon_
3d ago
That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.
All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".
anon_
3d ago
The other part is that the firm has the option to open a subsidiary office somewhere else and hire locally there. This is a substitute for trying to recruit those folks to physical move stateside.
That has lots of drawbacks: there will be additional overhead for travel, management, legal, compliance and whatnot. The remote office will be less productive (all told) and probably at a weird time zone.
Still, people forget that even in the world of tariffs, there's literally zero legal penalty for a US company to just open an office abroad and hire people.
anon_
3d ago
Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Americans are so wildly successful that their time is worth far more than the entire $20 just to clean a room. This is not a sign of failure, it's quite the opposite.
This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.
This just means the data science guys messed up and over-specified the flight. The airline likely lost money on it, it's not sustainable to run an airplane at less than 70-80% utilization (paging /u/madmonzer to fact check me).
[ As an aside, there might be different accounting when the airline has to run a money-losing connection in order to capture the profitable long-haul international seats. Still, better to run it on a smaller plane rather than leaving an empty. ]
anon_
3d ago
he cartels already have extant and significant distribution networks that new operations have to create from scratch.
At the same time, the cartels' distribution networks are ... not super cost efficient. I expect they are paying (either directly, through inefficiency or through outright theft) at least 20-100x what WalMart is paying :-)
anon_
3d ago
Why would they wait till legalization to ramp up their extortion racket? If it were possible to expand it in a profitable way, then they (meaning existing or new cartels) would do so.
anon_
3d ago
You can go further than merely psychoactive drugs. Robin Hanson & Bryan Caplan had a thought experiment about letting people buy (in his reification, at an unmarked physical store) anything that would otherwise have banned: poison, snake oil, chainsaws with no safeties, electronics that frequently shock the user or catch fire. One could even imagine a requirement that each customer recites on video (before being allowed entry) "I understand that everything in here would have been banned and is dangerous".
I bring this up particularly because psychoactive drugs are just one example of dangerous good. People have weirdly specific intuition about those drugs that often doesn't really track how they feel about the larger class. It also seems to track the culture war: legalization is a darling of the left, which is otherwise gung-ho to regulate everything else.
anon_
5d ago
employer compliance with E-Verify
Sorry, but this just doesn't do what you think it does. Even in the hands of the most scrupulous employers E-verify is hopeless.
I am 100% on the record that the Federal government should provide some accurate method for employers to verify that applicants are entitled to work (and, stretch goal, be continuously notified if that changes). That doesn't even remotely exist.
anon_
5d ago
Well, it's less locking the door and more that one resident continues to invite guests in, only for them to find another resident trying to throw them out, cycling ad-infinitum.
Not that I support the former here, but a fair characterization would mention it.
anon_
5d ago
Indeed, the men are immiserated as well.
Still, it's not true that a chunk of women are significant happier, otherwise they would have raised that line somewhat.
anon_
5d ago
Indeed. Now what percentage of the time is sexual assault a really salient risk: when alone with someone, in a sensitive place like a locker room, at a club or other place where lots of inebriated people congregate.
Those are real, but they don't comprise anything close to a plurality of situations that the modal human being faces.
anon_
5d ago
Indeed, the prevalence of body cam footage has undermined the demonize-the-police movement considerably.
anon_
5d ago
I'm not sure that conversation would have been possible at a policy level without the (largely, I agree, bullshit) personal angle. American politics doesn't seem to work at such a wonkish level. Without being too cynical, it seems at least possible that it just never happened otherwise.
The parallels to Trump are also interesting: would it have been possible to get conservative politics and a retreat of the worst of the LGBT (not that I want to roll back some level of acceptance, but surely high school locker rooms were a bridge way too far) without the personal angle of a thrice-married adulterer?
anon_
6d ago
I think you would very definitively lose that bet. Fig 4A has the cross tab for women.
anon_
6d ago
Well, if the claim is that even a plurality of daily interactions don't depend at all on the sex of those interacting, then that seems evidently true whether or not it's part of a larger project of the left.
[ This is a pet peeve of mine, even wrong movements are very often correct on at least something, even if it's embedded in a vast edifice of incorrect claims. They can't be wrong about everything all the time. ]
If society is richer than reproducing pairs, and the majority of that richness doesn't actually need to care about the biology (or anything else) of sex, then that's a fact we ought to understand & integrate.
anon_
6d ago
Thinking back on the vast majority of the interactions I've had in the last week or two, I can't think of that many in which it did matter. The clerk at the store, the other parents at the park, coworkers, friends. If it wasn't easy to tell which were biologically fe/male, I don't think it would have made my life that much harder.
Society is built on reproducing pairs, which is an inexorable function of biology -- but not a ton of day to day life impinges on that.
anon_
6d ago
Eh. OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good (a rare culture-war thing!). It's reduced excessive force, it's vindicated cases w/ justified use of force and it's shed light that neither totalizing view was remotely correct.
I'm not sure we would have gotten them in an alternate timeline without that national conversation.
anon_
6d ago
But the progressive activist is only happy with that status quo to the extent that they think there's enough goodwill to push it further.
The activist that has to fundraise needs a live conflict. They can't take yes for answer
Hence Dave Chapelle's admonition to the LGBT coalition that they ought to cash their chips in and go home before the crap out.
anon_
14d ago
And it's self-reinforcing. Unbelievably, some folks were questioning whether this shooting as a false flag which was itself gonna justify the goons and the gulag. One poster called it (and you can't make this shit up) a Reichstag-fire moment.
anon_
16d ago
I do expect that if they can get the noise level down, Mach 1.7 over land will be achievable. Granted this is more of a political than engineering question. On range, yeah, that is a sore spot. Hopefully a LR version gets to 5500nm which unlocks most of the transpacific.
The economics will be interesting. I'm not sure daily service is a must as you can freely mix-and-match supersonic and subsonic travel. Heck, you could run the thing purely westbound (LHR->JFK->LAX/SFO->ICN/HND->DXB->LHR) with the understanding that your biz travelers are taking a lie-flat on their eastbound legs. All-premium has been a losing proposition (RIP midwest) but that seems like a capacity thing right?
That said, you've convinced me to adjust my optimism a bit downwards, at least in the medium (say, 2035/2040) timeframe.
So it appears that JP Morgan may have allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue using their financial services, so of course the Times leads with the most bombastic possible version of this claim. One could imagine an alternative headline like How JPMorgan Conducted its Usual and Customary Business. Probably there are intermediate versions of this headline that are closer to neutral.
Headlines aside, right wing media is picking it up because all the Epstein stuff draws lots of clicks but I'm wondering (and hopefully I'm not alone) whether this is fundamentally about getting upset when banks don't drop unpopular clients even when their relationship has nothing to do with the clients' bad behavior.
That is to say, contra the Times, JPMorgan didn't enable Epstein's crimes in anything but the most useless sense of the world. Sure, he used money from the banks to pay people -- but I'm sure lots of criminals withdraw money from a Chase ATM in the commission of a crime, which hasn't (till recently) been laid on the bank.
The other claim is that his friends in the bank intervened when some transactions were flagged (for what, no one really explains) but this only deepens the original question: even if he was guilty of sex crimes, that doesn't imply that his financial dealings weren't in order. It's not money laundering or fraud to pay for underage hookers -- it's child prostitution which is illegal in its own right.
Ultimately where this seems to end is back to a place where banks rightly fear that they are gonna be next on the Times' hitlist because they didn't drop a client fast enough.
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