TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
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User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
5d ago
To build on this, I want to just quote Kelsey Piper's tweet discussing jobs programs versus domestic manufacturing https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1907980342272852436:
"well, we need to bring manufacturing back" this isn't how to do that. "well, how would you do that, then?"
First, think about what you are hoping to accomplish. Is this a jobs program? Is the point to have high-paying factory jobs for the non-college men who used to work in those jobs, independent of whether the output of those factory jobs is cost-competitive or quality-competitive with foreign-made goods? You can run a jobs program, if you want - America is absurdly rich, we can really do absolutely anything at all that we choose to make a priority - but you can't serve two masters here. If the point is a jobs program don't expect high quality goods or goods that are competitive on the export market, because that requires embracing automation and new mechanical processes and the people working these jobs have no incentive to go full speed ahead on that, and since you've chosen to give them a captive market you don't have a good way to push them on quality or on price.
To my mind, if we're going to do a jobs program it's silly to make it a factory jobs program. Factory jobs kind of sucked. My own quixotic dream of a jobs program is to put our national muscle behind fixing our perilously broken education system. Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men. There, jobs program, and the work isn't 'undercutting Vietnam in the garment industry', it's raising the next generation. If you don't like my personal idea, fine, but I think if you list the pros and cons of five different jobs programs you thought of in ten minutes apiece 'take back the textile industry from Vietnam' isn't going to be the most appealing of any of them.
What if your aim isn't a jobs program? What if it's defense? That's also fine, but keep in mind you still can't serve two masters; if this is about defense then we are going to laser-focus on defense production, and we're not treating this as a jobs program at all. Go to every manufacturer of munitions, planes and cars in the country. Ask them for all their suppliers. Acquire those companies, or partner with them, or hire a bunch of their leadership, and pay them to start up a plant in the US. Instead of scaring our allies with bizarre threats to add them to our territory, which has made many of them back away from commitments to the American defense industry, build those ties very strongly and start asking them for purchase agreements. Find really good CEOs who grew a complex logistical business in a related industry rapidly - yes, Elon Musk absolutely qualifies here, frustrated as I am with him - ask them to take responsibility for a supply chain and 10x production in the next two years, and give them the resources they need to do it. Send Ukraine an obscene amount of materiel, enough to actually win the war instead of just be stalemated in it. Make advance commitments to buy the munitions to do that, to support those companies in growing capacity.
What if your goal is neither jobs nor defense, but fostering the growth of an industry in the US that could stand on its own two feet once it existed but will never get started? Here's where tariffs actually make sense, but they should be relentlessly narrow, specific and targeted. What do you want to sell? Who in America is trying to build it? What inputs do they buy from abroad? Make it a priority of our trade policy to get them those inputs cheaply. Most of what you're doing is, once again, buying bits of the supply chain and hiring people who know how to do it, plus subsidizing them, but tariffs will be part of the picture. The CHIPS act was this done well. Every single tariff and every single subsidy should have an incredibly specific objective in mind, and if it isn't working to achieve that objective should be adjusted.
What if your goal is to negotiate a free trade agreement? Well, we've successfully negotiated lots of free trade agreements, it's not exactly a totally unknown art form. Have smart, competent, skilled negotiators with knowledge of the other side's constraints, resources, political concerns, and where we have leverage. Have bilateral negotiations; emerge with a deal; have Congress ratify it. Trying to do many-to-one negotiations doesn't work because it is so visible that a country's behavior to date has nothing to do with the tariffs that were imposed, because the way the tariffs were imposed puts many other countries' leadership in a position where doing what we want would be deeply unpopular at home, and because no one involved knew anything about the countries they were throwing tariffs at.
Again, we can do any of these things. We are not a country on the brink of becoming a failed state; we can execute on ambitious, ludicrous, serious things, and we absolutely should. We just have to figure out what we want and then line up the levers to get it done. I've always found something beautiful about the capacity of healthy societies to change gears on a dime, to set down their knitting and go do a shift at the munitions factory, to build cities in the dust overnight. We can reshore
Endquote (I'm too lazy to do the block quoting for all that.)
I actually disagree with her - I think we have proven relatively definitively that jobs programs in the United States currently do not work. Not because jobs programs are a bad idea in a vacuum, but because the government and the way we as citizens interact with the government has become so corrupted, that major government programs are doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.
Then again, perhaps a blatant jobs program would be better than the corrupt crap we have going on today?
Also, I don't think that manufacturing in the U.S. would lead to low quality. Yes we would have automation, but we would also need people to staff the plants. And the fact is, young men just tend to enjoy and be more drawn to working with their hands than working on computers all day. For the most part, at least.
Her take reads to me as a very well thought out, but stereotypically feminine and coastal elite view of the problem.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
5d ago
Yeah it was way worse than BioShock 2. I don't think it's a good high water mark for the video game industry.
IMO Oblivion was the last truly great game.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
6d ago
Oh absolutely. I think its the #1 reason the academy has fallen apart over the last few decades. 50% of people should not be going into academia. At most it should be 15-20%, and even that is quite high imo.
If you make something less selective, it becomes much much harder to police for good behavior.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
6d ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
I absolutely agree! I'm tired of people acting as if we don't have a labor force. We clearly do, we have just decided to let them not work and survive on handouts and other people's largesse. It's high time the situation is remedied.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7d ago
I love this comment, well said! Medicine does do a lot of amazing work.
My mother was saved of a stroke a few years back that would've killed her for sure just a decade earlier. It truly is amazing.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7d ago
This was one of the paragraphs I almost added in the initial thing. Tradesman is sort of an option. It's not as bad as coffee barista, but breaking six figure incomes seems pretty difficult.
On the ubiquitous internet advice to do this, after getting fired from my tech sales job I applied and worked as an electrician's apprentice for two months last year.
It was absolutely awful. Backbreaking work, in extreme heat. Digging ditches all day to run pipes and wires. Being in crawlspaces, just the worst. Long, loooong hours.
Also, all of the older men had horrible health, tons of injuries, were addicted to drugs and missing teeth, etc etc. The trades are not nearly as glamorous as they are made out to be online.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7d ago
Kudos to you for updating after seeing a particularly bad case of massaging the science for political outcomes. I also genuinely don't know how you reform academia and medicine when they are willing to be this blatantly political in their "science."
It's a shame because I love the Academy as an institution and an ideal, but it has become so corrupted it's shocking to me even on the 100th example. I hope for all our sakes we can find a way to save science without burning down too much.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7d ago
In a breaking news story, apparently Trump has privately said Musk will step back from his role in the admin.
Of course, this has been claimed multiple times before somewhat falsely, so take it with a grain of salt! However, over the last couple of months it does seem that Elon has been wearing out his welcome in the admin, as many posters here predicted might happen.
I'm curious what exactly the problems have been internally - do you think it's just that Elon hasn't been able to defer to Trump enough? Or to put it more bluntly, to flatter Trump's ego?
Or is it more of an issue of a lack of cuts? I haven't been able to get good numbers, but I do think that the general 'vibe' is that Elon's cutting has been disappointing so far. Perhaps this is because of the coordinated media attack against him, but it also could just be that cutting the federal government is a beastly task. Personally I'm of the opinion he should have more time, but sadly that may not be the case.
The ostensible reason Elon is giving is apparently to focus more on business interests. This could be the case, as I'd imagine running multiple giant companies while also trying to head a govt. department is... basically impossible. That being said, it goes against a lot of the messaging Elon and Trump put together when they first started DOGE.
Either way, this turn of events, if it bears out, seems bad for team Trump as a whole, given how many eggs were put in the cutting government spending basket. Without Elon cutting hardcore, I fail to see how their admin can get even close to balancing the budget.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8d ago
I wish more of you bastards read fantasy and sci-fi. Feels like I'm always the only one posting recs!!! If you have recs please let me know.
Just started A Requiem for Homo Sapiens it's pretty dang good so far if a bit info-dumpy.
Had to quit the Foreigner series, the main character was just such a self-righteous, annoying, immature jackass I couldn't deal with it. It's a shame, I got halfway through the third book because the world and aliens are quite cool, but damnit Bren you are such a fucker I just couldn't do it.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8d ago
ETA: oops wrong comment.
I wish more of you bastards read fantasy and sci-fi. Feels like I'm always the only one posting recs!!! If you have recs please let me know.
Just started A Requiem for Homo Sapiens it's pretty dang good so far if a bit info-dumpy.
Had to quit the Foreigner series, the main character was just such a self-righteous, annoying, immature jackass I couldn't deal with it. It's a shame, I got halfway through the third book because the world and aliens are quite cool, but damnit Bren you are such a fucker I just couldn't do it.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
14d ago
Tracing woodgrains has pushed back against the Tesla stuff.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
15d ago
The investors were clearly not happy. Also his chief talent, Ilya, did leave him with many other OG founders.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
16d ago
Beautiful! I love that you snuck the man a real $20. I bet he appreciates it.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
17d ago
Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.
Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
19d ago
It's nice to see you comment on threads besides the CW!!! Those books look cool.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
21d ago
Yeah this is definitely a culture war issue. I just feel like being excessively harsh on illegal immigration is punching down
They broke the law. You can't just have people flagrantly ignoring laws, especially ones as big as illegal entry into a country. It devolves trust in the entire system massively.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
22d ago
I am not a Roman Catholic. The Church is broader than the Patriarchate of Rome.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
23d ago
Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".
I like this framing. What do you think makes this predictable though?
Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.
Yeah unfortunately I agree... Christianity is still working through the implications of birth control but I on the whole think it's good for the Christian worldview. There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
23d ago
Actually, there are no Epstein files. We already know everything that there is to know (or at least everything that it is possible at this point to know). This is the null hypothesis.
What do we know so far? I mean do we even have the list of people who went to the island?
Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset, and thus releasing the files would damage US-Israeli relations (I’m sure some of our less-plilosemitic users will gladly explain how exactly this translates into leverage over the Trump Administration).
Yeah this is plausible I suppose... but dude if the intelligence agencies are covering up for huge pedophilia rings like... what the hell?!
The contents of the Epstein files personally implicate Donald Trump.
mmf good point. Didn't think of this one, but you know it does make sense. Sigh. I wish Trump wasn't so morally degenerate.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
23d ago
Given that nobody was brave enough to submit a top level comment, I figured I would start off the games this week.
I'd like to talk about the Epstein files, and general pedophilic corruption amongst the world's elite. I wasn't that surprised that Trump didn't end up releasing the full document, given his history of promising things will be declassified (like the JFK files) and then failing to deliver. (I still want to see those JFK files dangit.)
I have to admit though, I have trouble understanding exactly how this conspiracy works. I would imagine if there were a genuine sort of sex cult with underaged teenagers, demon worship, etc going on amongst the world's elite, we would have at least some hard evidence, some video footage, or some audio recording to point at, no? Common wisdom about conspiracies in rationalist circles is that it's too difficult to cover up a leak, especially over decades and with thousands of people. When the stakes get this high I would imagine it's even harder.
Then again, if the files aren't all that bad, why the heck aren't the files released? Why hasn't anything changed after the investigations? I've always been skeptical of the 'kookier' conspiracy theories about Freemason Illuminati cults ruling the world, but I have to admit after this, the UFO kerfuffle in Congress, and just general seemingly bonkers decisions about classified info, I am quite confused as to what a reasonable explanation is.
Anyway, what are your thoughts Mottizens?
I'm surprised. In Orthodox theology she is usually clothed in red, since she is putting on divinity.
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