OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7hr ago
Pslams are great for the drama, which can really come out with modern translations/settings:
Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain….
You will rule them with an iron scepter
You will dash them to pieces like Pottery
Therefore you kings be wise, be warned
You rulers of the Earth.
Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling!
Lord, I am weary with my groaning.
Lord, I drench my couch with tears.
I waste away from grief.
Or they'll devour my soul, like a lion
Tearing me to pieces while my screams ring out in vain!
For the wicked in their pride
Refuse to seek Him
All of their thoughts are,
"There is no God."
And his ways seem to prosper all the time
Your judgements are too high
They're out of his sight!
As if they were bread, they consume
They devour my people
They never call on the Lord
Too busy doing wrong
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9hr ago
Actually it looks like, in Hungary, the thing that improved TFR the most was housing subsidies:
https://hungary.representation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12/hetfa_fertilitymodels_20190913.pdf
Panel A indicates a significant positive effect of home ownership support in the third year. The parameter estimate indicates that a 1%point increase in home ownership support would lead to a 0.00047 (1.2% compared to baseline birth probability 3.87%, which is equivalent with 1099 additional births per year) increase in birth probability.
Here's a proposal:
Upon the birth of a third child to a married couple, the government gives them a down payment equal to 20% of the median US 4 bedroom single family home. They still have to qualify for a mortgage on their own and the money can only be used for this purpose. This applies even if the family owns a smaller sqft home
Pros:
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Incentivizes marriage.
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Incentivizes having kids young.
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Incentives home building if there are more buyers? But only if obstacles to home building decrease.
Edit: Feel the need to elaborate on that last one since it's contrary to typical market wisdom. But it would be similar to the Government subsidizing college - lots of colleges popped up to support the increased demand. Prices also rose, which brings me to the Cons)
Cons:
- Inflates home prices, but the couple still has to have sufficient income to qualify for the monthly payment so hopefully not by that much.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
I just don't understand the difference between going out and taking a boat or taking, say, a plane. Like, could we send special forces to an airport in Brazil and have them fly out with a dozen Boeing jets and it's not an act of theft or war? Something like that would be legal? Or do boats sit in a weird conceptual space?
I genuinely don't understand and am not intending to sound like I'm taking a side here. I'm not intentionally doing the noncentral fallacy. I just want to understand the difference between this and stealing the crown jewels.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
Thank you, this is very helpful. Would you say that the difference between piracy and this is that piracy is when an unflagged or false-flagged ship attacks a ship sailing under the flag of a country. And this is a country attacking an unflagged/false-flagged ship? So actually the opposite.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
Don't know if this belongs here or the culture war or small scale questions. But the US has sized a Venezuelan oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. I would like to know what makes this different than piracy, if anything.
The US says it had a "seizure warrant" for it. What does that mean? Was the vessel subject to US laws at any point, violated them, and this is the result?
The US says that the tanker is sanctioned. What does this mean? Economic sanctions usually mean, "I won't do business with you," can a sanction mean, "I won't let you do business with someone else, and if you do I'll seize your vessel in your waters?" At what point is a sanction a war with fancier language?
"Guyana's maritime authority said Skipper was falsely flying the country's flag." Does this impact the legal calculation?
Outside of the numerous questions, I'm getting Iraq war vibes from this. "They support terrorism! They have weapons of mass intoxication! The people will thank us, the leader is a dictator, etc etc."
Will the US have boots on the ground in Venezuela in a year? It seems so contrary to Trump's MO, what is going on here?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
They managed to keep out the riff raff with few strategies:
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0 parking. No street parking, no parking lots, you needed to park on your own driveway and walk to the parks.
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0 bathrooms. Kind of inconvenient when you have a potty-training child, but maybe a potty-training child is one of the riff raff they want to keep out.
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0 public transportation routes nearby.
The three combined guaranteed that everyone at the parks was a neighbor.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
Yes, I have a "Mud room" by the front door, with a bench and a place to hang coats and store shoes. Unfortunately, we almost always come into the house through the garage. The first floor is basically a high-use area. With four kids, food goes on the floor, people track dirt in from the backyard to the mudroom to the garage and back. It gets swept every day, mopped and vacuumed twice a week. I wouldn't eat off the floor (though my toddler does and hasn't gotten sick yet!).
No one wears shoes on the second floor.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
I once lived in a neighborhood that had practically 0 yard-space but 5 different parks/playgrounds within a 5-10 minute walk. It still wasn't "city living" since the nearest grocery store was still a good distance away, but I would take that over the 1/4 acre typical American suburb.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
This is like that "Mandatory booster seats reduce the birth rate" study. A feature that saved the lives of 1:100 prevents the entrance into he middle-class of 10:100.
Don't get me wrong, it's better to be financially stressed than dead. But I am explaining why people's experiences of the economy is not matching up with the markers economists are paying attention to. If economists actually want to figure it out, they need to start here. What is the minimum basket of goods someone needs to buy in order to achieve a "middle class lifestyle" this decade and how many people in each generation can afford it today?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50.
This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.
But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.
The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
I think Scott hit the nail on the head when he said that people feel like they need to do more to keep up. People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself. Now you have to compete against the world. I started feeling this way in the 2000's and it's only gotten worse.
Where I disagree with Scott is that CPI is the wonderful and infallible marker of how expensive things have gotten. It's not capturing people's necessary expenses, because necessary expenses have inflated. CPI does hedonistic adjustments.
A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes. The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant. But when the question is, "Do you feel like you can afford more than your parents?" The answer is "no." I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.
The same kinds of adjustments are made for things that legally aren't available anymore. In the past people bought cars without airbags and now we need to buy cars with airbags. The price increase from airbags is factored into the CPI and the CPI says the cost is flat given the upgrade, even if in real dollars it's 5k more. I like having airbags, don't get me wrong. But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."
The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy." Cars with more environmental and safety features, mandatory insurance costs, mandatory home features. Meanwhile jobs feel precarious - one wrong move and you'll be replaced by a foreigner or an AI chatbot and no one else will be hiring. Are we right or wrong to think so? I don't know. But that's the vibes part of the vibecession.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
Some of the most productive cities in the US are space-constrained by bays, mountains, etc and there isn't a "drive 20 minutes" cheaper option. There's "Drive 2 hours each way" cheaper options.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
The article seems to think that Greene is asking for the government to interfere by subsidizing families more. However, I have not seen anything of the sort in his articles or his X timeline. Instead, I suspect he's going to recommend building more homes and daycares to lower costs, based on how Part II ended. "We are a nation of builders." (bolded in the original.)
Boehm also says that Greene refuses to acknowledge tradeoffs, but Boehm hasn't provided the numbers for what tradeoffs exist for a couple in their 20s who are hoping to have replacement-rate level children by the time they're 40. Boehm seems to think that children are optional luxuries, ("First, all choices come with tradeoffs, and having kids is no exception.") On the individual level this may be true, but on the societal level this is not true.
Saying "you only need to pay the outrageous cost of childcare for the first 5-10 years of parenthood and then the cost becomes smaller" doesn't lower the barrier to entry at all.
In Part II, Greene added up the percentages of jobs that could support children in Lynchburg, VA, and it came up to 63.6%. This complements perfectly the 36% of people who responded to a Pew Research poll indicating they could not afford kids. This stood out to me as something significant but no one on either side of the debate has commented on it yet. (Edit, this is a mistake on my part, it's 36% of people who don't have kids already who said the reason was they could not afford them, not 36% of the total population of people age 25-45.)
Complaints about the articles I am sympathetic towards:
Greene completely messed up his calculation on Part I by picking the numbers in a county in NJ, instead of actual National Averages. In Part II, his correction to $100,000 seems more accurate.
Greene is really trying to calculate the "Middle Class" line and distinguishing it from the "Working Poor" line. He conflates "Working Poor" with "Impoverished."
The articles being flawed doesn't detract from them being viral and noteworthy. They struck a cord with people.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
What if the goal was to destabilize the US? Andrew Yang used to argue pretty convincingly that Trump's 2016 election was only made possible by the Opioid crisis destroying communities.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
The notorious Far Right rag, the NYT, has issued an article that pretty much backs what I've been saying: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-strike-order-venezuela.html
According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.
But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.
The two officials questioned whether the surviving people were Admiral Bradley's intended target in the second strike, as opposed to the purported drugs and the disabled vessel. They argued that the purported cargo remained a threat and a lawful military target because another cartel-associated boat might have come to retrieve it.
The boat was the target of the second strike, not the people. Common sense prevails.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Yeah, sure. But I haven't seen evidence of Trump being particularly bloodthirsty, which seems to be the implications being driven at.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
My understanding is that it's actually more complicated, even if there was a strike purposefully for the purpose of killing two shipwrecked hostile non-state actors.
The quote you reference has a citation referring to a specific event where a military stopped and questioned lifeboats fleeing a sunk hospital ship.
After having sank the ship, the commander decided to ascertain whether the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants and approached the surviving lifeboats. After having interrogated them and having found no indication that the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants or munitions, the U-Boat fired at the lifeboats, sinking two out of three.
The citation should not taken to indicate that shooting everyone who's ever been shipwrecked is always illegal. For example, in the specific case referenced in the Manual, if the lifeboats had combatants or munitions it would have been acceptable to kill them. The Manual is giving a specific example of a time when soldiers were found to have committed an illegal act.
That said, I think it is more likely given the facts known now that no such order was given, and instead the order was to destroy the boat after the first strike did not do sufficient damage for mission parameters. The deaths of the narcoterrorists was incidental.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Yes, the renter is worse off. The renter has such a huge barrier to buying a house it might as well be on the moon.
But 1 Million in the stock market would be better than a 1 Million house, can we agree on this much? If your net worth is 1 Million, that doesn't tell us a complete picture of financial health. I think that's all that I'm trying to say here.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Your first comment seemed to be about the new scandal - the double strike. Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."
No, Trump is clearly doing something with Venezuela. But if you want to argue about the whole situation in general, it would require putting forward more of an argument on your part.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Being able to go into debt is not wealth or everyone attending college right now would be worth $100,000.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18d ago
You don't need a painting but you need a shelter. You don't need an Apple stock and you can sell it without needing to buy another S&P stock to replace it. I don't think that home value increases are wealth in the sense a good stock and bond portfolio is, but they are often treated as such in economic calculations. Accessing that wealth requires lowering a standard of living in some way that isn't replicated with other assets.
People who drink Starbucks don't really like coffee, they like Starbucks syrups.
It's more like: imagine someone who really likes Tomatoes. They grow different varietals from seeds and buy them from Farmer's markets and they eat them raw and sliced with a homemade light dressing. But they don't like tomato sauce.
I don't think it would be fair to tell such a person: "Actually most tomatoes are eaten in tomato sauce, if you don't like tomato sauce you don't really like tomatoes."
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