MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Excessive rents in tier-1 metro areas (even for poor-quality accommodation in less-good neighbourhoods) is a near-universal problem and near-universally recognised as a problem. So I don't think this is a "doomed because not following my preferred policy" issue - it is a "doomed because universally recognised problem is not being solved" issue (although the simplest solution would be to adopt my preferred policy and increase housing supply). Certainly my intent when stating the proviso to exclude issues like "taxes too high" or "you can't own a gun" where the question of whether there is a problem at all is controversial.
The problem is worse in the UK and Ireland than in Continental Europe, but Barcelona, Paris, and Frankfurt all show the classic pattern, with the same retarded political response as London or San Francisco.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Ignoring the "Europe is doomed because they are not following my preferred policy" style of arguments, the big ones are:
- The fertility crisis among the productive classes in Europe is worse than the US (but not as bad as first-world Asia)
- Europe is not self-sufficient in food or energy
- The places in Europe you can go to escape the NIMBY cities are much less attractive than Texas.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Agreeing with @Skibboleth - I don't think the exact nature of the Danegeld being requested is the point - the question is whether paying the Danegeld delivers any relief from the Dane or not.
If Harvard's read of what happened to Columbia (I don't understand the detail of the deal, but I assume Harvard do) is that they caved and the Trump admin immediately came back for more then they the only demands they should concede are to do things they wanted to do anyway but couldn't for internal politics reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
and the lack of the soon-to-boil-over extreme ethnoreligious tensions present in the UK/France/Germany/Benelux
It remains the case that ADOS blacks are more numerous and more troublesome than any of the troublesome minorities in western European countries. The nearest thing to an exception is North African Arabs in France - differential fertility means that they are 16% and rising of French babies (vs 12% and falling of the US being ADOS blacks) - so this statement will not be true of France in 20 years' time unless there is signifiant assimilation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.
Sokal rather famously published a paper discussing (among other aspects of the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) the inadequacy of the Axiom of Choice to solve the problems caused by females being the ones who gestate and breastfeed as part of a more general example of the inadequacy of liberal solutions to solve the problems of kyriarchy. It got published in a formerly respectable journal, too.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
The Court doesn't need to decide hypothetical cases (and, indeed, is prohibited from doing so by Article III of the Constitution). The Court has to decide the instant case, where the prisoners are being held by El Salvador on the instructions and at the expense of the United States.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
FWIW, it remains an unsolved question to what extent the President can bypass the Congressional power to declare war by simply ordering a surprise attack.
Should be may. Regardless of what the Constitution says or means, the President can do that if and only if the armed forces will reliably obey the order, which was what I was thinking about.
If the political feelings of the officer corps were such that the armed forces would reliably obey an order to launch a surprise invasion of Greenland, I suspect Meyers would not have done what she did.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Also, if you are using the fall of the Roman Republic as an example, the impact of the so-called Marian reforms (I am not qualified to engage in the ancient history nerds' argument about how much Marius is actually to blame) is fundamental, and has no US equivalent. The Roman Republic became vulnerable to military coups (of which Marius' re-election as consul was the first de facto and Sulla's was the first de jure, and which continued even under the Emperors) because the citizens' army (with military service linked to voting rights in the centuriate assembly) was replaced with a long-service professional army drawn from the proles, with legions which were in practice personally loyal to their generals.
The US armed forces swear their oaths to the Constitution. While there is considerable debate about whether the Constitution is living or dead, we all agree that even if alive it lacks the necessary skills to command troops. So if the downward spiral continues much further the question becomes "Who do the troops actually take orders from?" To pick a topical example, Col Meyers thinking she could get away with her insubordinate display in Greenland suggests that there is a broad consensus among the officer corps that an order by President Trump to launch a surprise attack on an ally would not be obeyed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
The classical Gold Standard didn't slide into fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking was baked into it from the start - the Bank of England was founded in 1694 with the explicit mission of generating a float that would be lent to the Crown in order to fund the rebuilding of the Royal Navy.
You can download historical data on the BoE balance sheet here. I calculated the bullion-to-base-money reserve ratio by dividing "Coin and bullion" assets (column O) by the sum of "Notes in circulation" (column S) and "Bankers' deposits" (column AE - this is commercial bank reserves viewed as liabilities of the central bank). The ratio oscillates between 60% and 80% during the classical Gold Standard era (roughly 1844-1914 in the UK), drops during WW1, returns to the target range in the 1920's, and then goes off a cliff due to Depression-era money printing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
The promise of hard money is that individuals can accumulate wealth by saving without needing to invest. Since society as a whole cannot do this, hard money systems are inherently unstable. They normally end with a coalition of indebted warriors and merchants liquidating the token-hoarders when the burden of trading real resources for tokens becomes intolerable.
The majority of the population who are not bitcoin speculators have no reason to hand over $3 trillion of real economic value to bitcoin speculators, so they probably won't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
In addition, almost every local authority in the UK except Birmingham has contracted out rubbish collection. Although the original reason for doing this was to bust the unions, it has the added advantage that binmen are not available to predatory lawyers as a comparator group for an equal pay claim.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Republican boomers don't march next to atomwaffenfront or "put their white bodies on the line to protect brave young people doing Direct Action." The right doesn't have the organization or ideological discipline to use confused and wishy washy boomers as pawns.
That is mostly because the Republicans don't normally use marches and demos as a political tactic. (They work much better for movements with an urban base.) The last time they did was on Jan 6th 2021, and there were absolutely Republican boomers protesting peacefully on the Ellipse and Capitol lawn while Proud Boys and groypers were ransacking Nancy Pelosi's office.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
the America of the Founders
The more American history I read, the more I think this is a misleading concept. The way I see it is that the Founding Fathers didn't found America - both in the sense that America already existed (founded by the Pilgrim Fathers et al.) and in the sense that the United States established in 1789 wasn't a nation-state.
The Founding Fathers were founding a sovereign state (in the technical international law sense of that term) that was itself a federation of sovereign States (in the sense of the States in 1789 being separate free self-governing political communities). They were building political institutions, and in order to do so they deliberately punted on three questions that go to the heart of "what is America as a country?" The first is the slavery question, which we all know about. As it turned out, America couldn't remain a country without resolving that question, and I don't think that would have surprised the founders. The second is the democracy question. The 1789 Constitution deliberately doesn't establish a right to vote - the founders were agnostic as to whether the republic they were establishing would be democratic or oligarchic. But by the Jackson administration the fact that America is a democracy is part of the national identity and rolling back universal white, male suffrage would be unthinkable. And the third was the religion question (both in the sense of "Is America a Christian nation or just a nation where the population happens to be majority-Christian?" and in the sense of "What does it mean to be a Christian country when you are committed to neutrality between mutually excommunicate Christian denominations?"), which America is still successfully punting on.
Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union. It became a country as a result of the Monroe and Jackson administrations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Still says "Gulf of Mexico" from non-US IPs. Still called the "Gulf of Mexico" by everyone who isn't trying to pass a retarded loyalty test. I don't think the workers of the world were united in Havel's Czechoslovakia either, regardless of what the greengrocer said.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Equity index futures are not a new thing. The first S&P 500 index future was traded in 1982.
Financial professionals don't take the Dow particularly seriously as an index, and there were practical advantages to concentrating trading in a single US large-cap index, which is why Dow index futures were not traded until 2015.
I suspect the reason why there used to be less coverage of equity index futures markets in the non-specialist media is the development of the 24hr news cycle - it was only recently that a journalist (or citizen journalist) would need to report on equity markets when the stock exchange was closed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
though in latter years the focus transitioned from historical reconstruction to maximizing tournament-effectiveness.
Interesting - I would have assumed that the historical masters had refined their styles to be close to optimum given the weapons available. Does tournament-effective differ from historical because modern fencers have better techniques than the historical masters, or because there is something artificial about modern tournaments which mean that historical combat-optimised techniques are not tournament-optimal?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
geographical indicators
The geographical indicator row is not primarily a protectionist one - the EU is demanding that other countries protect geographical names so that (for example) American winemakers can't call their Champagne-style sparkling wines "Champagne" in the US domestic market. The GI row is analogous to IP rows which end up as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
I can't figure out to what extent Americans realize how off-putting their rhetoric is for people on the outside. Too drunk on power to care, or actually believe themselves to be victimized, justified in belligerence? Either way, very effective at making people root for US humiliation. If not reflected at the top of US hierarchy, I'd think it an astroturfing campaign ran by US adversaries.
Among the small number of people who are paying attention and nevertheless support Trump, the standard argument steelmans as:
- Bluntness sometimes forms part of an effective communication strategy
- Unreasonable demands sometimes forms part of an effective negotiation strategy
- Both of these will be perceived as offensive
- So being more willing to be offensive that the establishment likes is directionally correct.
The main problem with this argument is that being offensive other than as a calculated tool of policy is an unforced error which simply makes people less willing to cooperate. So unless you start with a presumption that Trump is playing 11-dimensional chess such that every insult is a calculated maneuver in a power game you don't understand, you quickly come to the conclusion that he is being far more offensive than the optimum.
The other problem is that PMC communication norms exist for a reason. A core skill of PMC members who are elite enough to have other PMC members as inferiors is how to communicate inherently offensive information (such as blunt feedback or unreasonable demands) in a way does not force the inferior to take offense in order to avoid feeling like a cuck and/or looking like a cuck in front of their own inferiors. High-level diplomacy is a special case of communication between elites, so the PMC norms should apply - public chainsaw diplomacy is the opposite.
A separate but related problem is that Trump's domestic supporters either believe or excuse his lies, but to the rest of the world they just signal detachment from reality. The "madman strategy" involves communicating to the other party that you are irrationally committed to your goals, but otherwise oriented towards objective reality. Example: "I am happy to see global thermonuclear armageddon if I can't have Ukraine". Trump's approach is more like "I am happy to blow up the global trading system if you don't abolish these non-existent tariffs". This is the "fentanyl zombie strategy" and what you do if there are fentanyl zombies in your neighborhood is remove them, and if you can't do that you remove yourself.
Reagan was the Great Communicator because he was blunt ("Evil Empire", "Tear down this wall" etc.) precisely when correct, blunt statements served his goals, and polite the rest of the time. Trump is not that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Is the Royal Australian Navy really large enough to justify multiple VADMs? It is significantly smaller than the Royal Navy, which is generally understood to be over-officered with 1 Admiral and two Vices.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
He's also just a liar armored in sycophants trying to "translate" his thoughts to something acceptable to win power which always makes it harder. At a certain point I give people a little grace for not knowing that he actually has values.
I think people in general, and elites especially, should be held responsible for the consequences of acting with insufficient information, particularly when the relevant information was readily available if you could be bothered to look. Trump's protectionism was not secret. If Ackman was holding his nose and voting and campaigning for a protectionist in order to see pain inflicted on annoying anti-Israel campus activists, he is a bad person who should feel bad. If he didn't know Trump was a protectionist, he was culpably stupid and deserves to lose all his money, this being the traditional punishment for culpable stupidity in the hedge fund and private equity industry.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Trump absolutely campaigned on a yuuge tariff policy, even if it wasn't the message he was repeating often enough to get through to low-information voters. I agree he didn't campaign on this tariff "policy".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
That is not what the face-eating leopards meme is supposed to be about. The meme isn't about voting for the "Motherhood and Apple Pie Party" and being genuinely surprised when the MAPP starts unleashing face-eating leopards. It is about people who voted for the "Face-Eating Leopards Party" being surprised when the leopards eat their face.
I do not think left-wing tech oligarchs supported the Democrats because they wanted to see economic pain inflicted on non-tech oligarchs. I do think a large number of right-wing tech oligarchs supported MAGA precisely because they wanted to see economic pain inflicted on PMC professionals who were not tech oligarchs. (In most cases primarily "paper belt" workers they perceive as being overpaid for unproductive work, but at least in the case of Musk and Andreesen, explicitly including non-founder tech employees).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
I do not think the US was facing total destruction when the Clinton-Gingrich regime ran surpluses. Obama-era sequestration wasn't big enough to "deal with the debt" but it was a big step in the right direction.
The actual politics is that deficit-reducing policy is only possible under a Democratic President with a functional conservative Republican majority in at least one house of Congress. The good news is that this could become a long-term norm if Trump trashes the Republican party's reputation, but not by enough to overcome Senate malapportionment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
IP licensing shows up as capital income, not as a services export. So it counts to the current account balance, but not the goods and services balance.
This doesn't matter politically because almost nobody talks about the goods and services balance - economists talk about the current account, and non-economists talk about the goods-only balance.
Because of corporate tax avoidance, it also doesn't matter in practice. A lot of what is in reality services exports (such as Facebook ad revenue in Europe) shows up in the US balance of payments accounts as IP licensing transactions between subsidiaries of the same US companies in different jurisdictions.
Tariffs are a tool, not a policy. The policy that was being implemented by the Trump tariffs was not a policy to reindustrialise the US and isolate China.
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