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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2621 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am trying to find a post from either here or the subreddit about the Russian revolution, and specific horrific details of the Red Terror. Details included pouring molten metal down the throats of priests. I'm guessing it was on reddit, because I can't find it using the search here, and reddit's search doesn't give me as many options as this one does. I think either gattsuru or FCfromSSC wrote it. Edit: I am pretty sure this comic by Existential Comics made a feature in the post, and it was juxtaposed against the actual horrific details of the revolution.

Here

Thank you very much.

This is a PSA?

Three months ago I responded to @TowardsPanna's post about data removal services.

In that post I linked to a video by Dan Saltman, the owner of Redact.dev, discussing shady practices in the industry.

It has recently come to light that Dan Saltman is, allegedly, using the Redact.dev database to doxx individuals' private information. Apparently, this is an intimidation tactic to help cover up the accusations made against the political streamer Destiny, who allegedly filmed and distributed non-consensual intimate recordings of multiple women.

No data removal service can be trusted.

Do not use Redact.dev.

I've occasionally heard people allude to the idea that "dyslexia" isn't really a discrete medical condition, but rather a sort of cope that parents use to prevent their kid feeling bad about being a bit on the slow side, or lacking in verbal comprehension. For example, Freddie deBoer:

Let’s set aside whether dyslexia is one thing or many things and whether or not it’s simply a term that we came up with to say that some people are poor readers, as a matter of compassion.

Is there anything to this? Is dyslexia a real medical condition, or a contested one? Is it generally sensibly diagnosed by qualified professionals, or is there an epidemic of self-diagnosis muddying the water?

It can be both.

Unfortunately the sort of hard data to show correlation is precisely the sort of thing that is most likely to be affected by political suppression.

Anecdotally: I've met people in all four categories of that particular powerset.

Personal anecdote, but:

Dyslexia is absolutely a real thing, distinct from generally being bad at reading/verbal reasoning/whatever.

I have mild dyslexia. I have never had any problems in school because of it (I was very good in school in general) except specifically with spelling -- if I mix up an i-before-e or something like that, I simply cannot see it.

This was true in school, and it's still true now, many years later. I work as a programmer, and before I installed a spellcheck in my coding enviroment, I had repeated issues with pull requests where I would misspell a variable name, use it hundreds of times (including in comments and documentation where there wasn't autofill or anything), and never notice. The code would work just fine, but my PR would inevitably have a comment to the effect of "this looks good, but you misspelled name everywhere".

If it's pointed out to me, I still can't see it until I stare at it for a few minutes, at which point the letters will almost physically rearange themselves in my perception and all of a sudden it's obvious.

Note that my dyslexia was never so bad as to make reading difficult -- I only ever swap one or two letters at once in the middle of words, and that doesn't really effect reading, but the 'letters physically rearange themselves in my perception' is definitely a real thing, and I can imagine a much higher degree of rearangement would make a lot of school really hard.

Given that my son has a severe language acquisition problem, I don't doubt that dyslexia is a medical condition. If you think about it, being able to interpret strings of symbols as meaningful words is a completely unnatural skill. If you don't get enough practice at the right stage of your brain development, when you already have well-developed speech but the rest of the brain is still pliable, it's going to be much harder to develop the skill to the level when you don't have to expend any conscious effort to read.

If you're asking if dyslexia is more like flu than like hypertension, then I have no answer. Does it matter, though?

Dyslexia severity is dimensional, but I'm pretty sure that difficulty differentiating letters with near-congruent/similar geometry (e.g., b, d, p, and q, in this font - you can look up fonts intended for people with dyslexia) is a distinct phenomenon from other learning disorders. is what I wrote, before double-checking the wikipedia page, which I interpret as stating that dyslexia is in the "all neuro-cognitive-developmental badness is correlated" cluster of poorly studied weirdness. But why didn't you read the wikipedia page, before asking?

I did read the Wikipedia page, but I'm also distinctly aware that, for any contentious topic, Wikipedia is ideologically captured and cannot be relied upon to provide a neutral answer. If there were a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists etc. who privately agreed that dyslexia isn't a real illness, and if there was a large community of people diagnosing themselves with it, I'm not sure if I'd trust Wikipedia to say so.

I am an unaware of any large body of psychiatrists considering dyslexia not a real illness. Nobody I know in my professional life has voiced such an opinion either.

My the-type-of-layperson-who's-interested-in-this-sort-of-thing-and-posts-here impression: There are enough examples of people with normal or even exceptionally good visual/spatial reasoning/general cognitive abilities and a specific inability to read (for a famous example, Jackie Stewart never learned to read, but was an international skeet shooting champion/Olympics alternate and one of the all-time great racecar drivers and claims to have developed a very good memory in compensation for his inability to read; less famously, New Zealander architect and engineer John Britten; also, many artists in both visual and non-visual media) that it seems to be proven that a neurological deficit that's fairly specific to reading exists. However, this population and populations with less-specific neurological deficits may not be natural kinds and, depending on the purpose/context, the less-specific deficit(s)/manifestation of the deficit(s) in common may be more salient.

You may get better answers in the SSC subreddit or ACX open thread.

I'm not sure what would be the difference? Some people are, for some reason unique to them, bad at X. Is it a "real medical condition"? It certainly seems to be real, it certainly seems to be a "condition" - as in, describable and identifiable phenomenon, as for whether it's "medical" I'm not sure that's a robust term. Can you take a pill to cure it? Currently probably not, but there are hundreds of problems that have no pill to cure it. Do we know a sufficiently reduced biological or chemical level cause? Probably not again, but again hundreds of problems without known causes reduced to chemistry or cell biology. The distinction sounds like a political question - e.g. "should people with condition X be covered by ADA and subject to reasonable accommodation provisions, or you just can fire them at will if they're bad at X and you need somebody who's good at X" - but those are impossible to answer objectively. So I think "simply a term that we came up with" describes a lot of things that also absolutely real conditions.

Say you have a condition that makes your leg muscles be 20% slower than average, and that makes you suck at running. If we call that "disrunnia", is it a real medical condition or just a cope parents use to make kid not feel bad for coming last in every race?

I guess my question is more along the lines of "is dyslexia distinct in any meaningful way from a lack of skills in verbal reasoning?"

I don't understand how it could not be distinct? Dyslexia affects reading, so why would that be related to verbal reasoning?

Grammar aside the answer is yes. My sister is pretty badly dyslexic, I remember it took a ton of effort from my mom to teach her to read. But she does just fine in all other language things (and always did), it was purely reading (and spelling) which gave her trouble.

Completely. I've known people with dyslexia for decades and they have normal or better than normal skills in verbal reasoning. They just have a specific dysfunction that causes easily problems with reading and writing that are easy to recognize and have a specific pattern to them.

To me it sounds like asking "is migraine distinct in any meaningful way from having a headache?" or "is depression distinct in any meaningful way from feeling really bad all the time?" Like yes, I can find a way in which these descriptions might be different (e.g. you can feel bad without being depressed, etc.) but why it would be useful, that's what I am not getting?

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread?

Yes. Why is Trump going all out on executive orders despite Republicans controlling congress? Next time a Dem wins it can all be undone, and if Dems win the midterms, there will be zero chance of passing legislation. Are there too many Never Trump Republicans? Does all the important legislation require a 60% majority? Is the Trump admin working on legislation that I've missed? What's up?

Because it's much harder to stop an EO that does X than pass a law that authorizes the executive to do the same. Trump's EO's are within the acceptable range of what the GOP in congress approves of, but they are not their preferred solutions.

Loud Democratic opposition to the EOs may galvanise congress to pass the same thing as bills. That's more or less how Brexit got through - the original vote was fairly split, as was parliament, but the sheer scale of anti-democratic pushback galvanised a 'fuck you' landslide at the next election.

It's not so much never Trump Republicans as it is that the majority in the House is narrower than the number of total wingnutz who won't reliably agree to anything at all in the Republican caucus.

We're just over a week into the administration. Legislation doesn't move this fast. Further, it seems to me that these actions can serve as a proof of concept, which congress can then cement at their more measured pace.

Further still, while the GOP has largely been conquered by MAGA, there are still significant pockets of resistance to be mopped up. Try to do all this through the legislative branch, and you drastically increase your attack surface.

Also, EOs are much more flexible and dynamic. You can make EO today, see how it goes for a week and amend or rescind it in a week. You usually won't be able to do anything like that with legislation.

But some of it it's not easy to undo. I.e., for example, if Trump closes USAID, in 4 years democrats may create another one, but it won't be the same one as they have now, they'd have to work for a long time to rebuild it to match what it is today. Same e.g. for DEI in federal government - it took years to build all that bureaucratic infrastructure, and if it will be gone, it will take years to rebuild. And Trump has 4 years to try and make the law preventing it that would survive judicial scrutiny. There's no rush in that.

We're just over a week into the administration. Legislation doesn't move this fast.

Specifically, this page shows that literally zero substantive bills have even made it out of committee so far.

(Votes have been taken on a few dozen relatively minor bills by suspending the rule that requires a bill to be approved by a committee first. You can see the details by clicking on one of those bills—e. g., the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act—and selecting the "Actions" tab.)

Thanks. Using EOs as trial balloons for future legislation make sense to me.

Why isn’t Tesla stock crashing? The intersection between the set of people who care enough about the environment to buy an electric car, and the set of people who don’t hate Elon’s guts doesn’t provide much room for growth.

Hype about self driving, hype about robots, and a call option on Elon.

As Peter Thiel said, never bet against Elon.

In other news, yesterday it was revealed that X is making a healthy profit now.

Do you need to care about the environment to get an electric car? My brother is big into EVs because he's... I'm not even sure what to call it, mechanical tech nerd? Like he's obsessed with electric cars, electric unicycles, fancy powerful flashlights, and stuff like that, rather than computers and programming.

You don't have to pay for gas, you can use regenerative braking and stuff, it runs really smooth and quiet. The only reason to buy a gas car is because they're cheaper up front. For now. If Teslas can continue to improve technologically and get cheaper then they have a real future among normal people buying them for practical reasons, completely divorced from ideology.

You definitely don't. My wife got an electric car for her latest car, and she's not really that concerned about the environment. She just wanted electric.

I live in pretty red area and I see quite a number of Teslas and recently some Cybertrucks around. I don't think it's only hardcore wokes who buy them. Tbh, if Tesla changed some of its approaches to control design (like relying on complex screen-driven interactions instead of large simple tactile physical controls) I'd be open to getting one myself (a Tesla, Cybertruck is too ugly for me). Electricity is not that expensive here, and for short commutes (which are like 80% of car usage for me) it makes total sense.

It's been 15 years and we still don't have an electric car that's focused on driving, and perhaps emblematic of this, there are no electric convertibles.

I just want a Roadster 2 (with the same level of tech and type of controls the original had) but with 4 seats and 1000 km of highway range: basically, I'm waiting for someone to build an electric Mustang (and not that stupid Mach-E crap). I'd feel much better having Coyote performance for the price of an Ecoboost and could accept a 30-minute charge time if my car performed that way, and I also want the paddle regen that some of the Hyundais have where you can choose how much engine braking -> weight transfer you want. At that point I might accept a screen for configuring those features only.

This isn't a complicated problem. Just offer me a regular car.

Wait, but a convertible is not a regular car. A regular car is Honda Civic.

I mean, they offer Mustangs as coupes, too.
In fact, the Mustang is the only car Ford sells (and the only car any American automaker makes); so if that isn't a "normal" car I'm not sure what is.

(Why anyone would buy the coupe model when a convertible exists is anyone's guess, since the rear seats in a coupe are much less useful than those in a convertible because you hit your head on the roof if you try to use them, but I digress.)

the Mustang is the only car Ford sells (and the only car any American automaker makes)

Are you working off an unusual definition of "car"?

It is not unreasonable to exclude crossovers and SUVs from the word "car". The US government calls them "light-duty trucks" and imposes on them more-lenient fuel-efficiency standards.

For me the reasons to get the coupe over the convertible:

  • I don't want to have to devote a precious garage space to protecting the soft top
  • Not being able to leave anything in the car when out
  • The superior performance from the rigidity of the coupe
  • IRL I'll hardly ever drive with the top down. Your girl will think it's fun for 5 minutes, then be annoyed her hair is all tangled.
  • Generally not having to worry about leaks or a surprise rain storm destroying the interior of my car
  • No Greg, I can't drive us all to lunch again. I have the coupe today. We'll have to put miles on your leased Infinity if you want to go to lunch.

(1) The Honda Civic is a bit bloated nowadays (base price 24 k$). Some people would say that a "regular car" is more like a Mitsubishi Mirage (17 k$) or a Nissan Versa (19 k$ with CVT).

(2) Cheap Civic-ish cars used to be available in convertible form. See, e. g., the Geo Metro.

Some people would say that a "regular car" is more like a Mitsubishi Mirage (17 k$) or a Nissan Versa (19 k$ with CVT).

Surely a "regular car" can't be one of the two cheapest cars on the market? One of which is discontinued due to lack of demand?

Surely a "regular car" can't be one of the two cheapest cars on the market?

I still see a lot of cheap 20-year-old Civics on the roads. And the US market is not the only market in the world.

One of which is discontinued due to lack of demand?

If the government has made all the regular cars unprofitable to sell, and effectively mandated that only bloated, expensive vehicles be sold, do the bloated vehicles become regular cars? I think the answer is "no".

Cheap Civic-ish cars used to be available in convertible form

A wide variety of cars used to be available like that. Now there are only two that sell for less than 50K new, and one of them only seats two.

An electric Honda Del Sol would be pretty fun!

It’s a meme stock. If you’re looking for how research analysts are justifying their hold ratings, it’s by suggesting that the AI and self driving stuff will all pan out perfectly.

  1. Much of their revenue and until recently all of their profit is based off of various government regulatory schemes for selling pollution credits to other automakers. Elon seems... Unlikely... To remove those particular government boondoggles.

  2. They are genuinely amazing, class leading, genre destroying pieces of machinery.

  3. People just think of it as investing in Musk. His stock is up, I'd imagine.

I hate to do this but can you provide a source for claim #1? “Much” of their revenue seems like a stretch. I’ll define much as >20% but I’ll accept 10%.

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump

It's less of their revenue than I thought, only around 5% anymore, but still makes up 43% of their profits for 2024, which is much higher than I'd think. We're talking about $2bn in 2024 and ~$10bn to date. It's not a small amount of money.

ETA: Probably the sentence would be more accurate as "derives much revenue" than "derives much of their revenue"

I think this was very much true in the past. Net income rather than revenue circa 2021:

Net profit reached a quarterly record of $438 million on a GAAP basis, and the company recorded $518 million in revenue from sales of regulatory credits during the period.

So in the early part of the 2020's, more than all the net profit was driven by credits.

But with a current TTM PE Ratio over 100, I assume >90% of the "value" of the company is in future expectations.

Edit: The "until recently" is sort of load bearing though. The 2024 annual report gives $2.8B in regulatory credits, $97.7B total revenue, $7.2B net income on a GAAP basis. So single digit portion of revenue but >1/3 of the net profit last year.

My understanding is that Tesla stock has always been at the intersection of memestocks and greater-fool, hype-based speculation. (Something along the lines of Musk running Tesla as a tech company that just happens to make cars and the market analyzing its stock more like that of a tech company than that of a car company.) However, there's also something of a sales floor, in that their head-start on EV design and direct-to-consumer sales model keeps the cars competitive, and EVs are equal or superior for many use cases.

Does Tesla's stock price have much to do with their sales? I thought the P/E ratio was already absurd.
I think most of the value comes from the assumption that libs will follow through with the gas car bans they've already passed, making people's desires irrelevant.

I think it’s unrealistically optimistic to think that those polities care more about global warming or the consumer experience than they do about keeping Elon Must out of their business.

San Francisco deciding we must roll coal to save the planet from evil billionaires would be the last straw for me putting on clown makeup and moving into the sewers

What do young people's signatures look like?

Everyone I know has a signature based on cursive script, but apparently schools aren't teaching it anymore, so what do young folks do on forms? Just print their name and draw some stars around it like Krusty the clown? I remember hearing there was a high level of ballot curing in Nevada because "young people don't have signatures anymore" but idk what that even means. Or even more broadly, is bad penmanship going to create legal problems because nobody writes things down anymore, they just type them?

Millennial here. I just write my name down in cursive. For a while when I was a teenager I tried to half-ass a real signature by adding come curves on top, but I gave up on that years ago.

Signatures, like wax seals, are an obsolete relic of an age before instant telecommunications and cryptographic security. The idea was to have unique glyph that was easy for the owner to recreate and easy for other people to read and compare with other examples of the same glyph but hard for other people to forge.

These days it basically works on the honor system; I have never seen anybody compare signatures against an example on file before authenticating a transaction.

I have. A colleague who persistently couldn't match his signature to the one a bank had on file was a constant pleasure. Then again, we mongrels used fax machines up to 2020 that I know for sure, and probably are still using to this day as well.

Kids just write their name as fast as possible until it starts to look like cursive. Only the initials have to be legible. There's not much thought into it.

In compulsary education, a student is probably going to be writing their name on paper 3-8 times a day from 1-12th grade. I don't think this will ever change for as long as we have paper tests and paper homework.

Schools in my country still have cursive last time I checked.

I simply write my name in my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike.

my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike

Yeah that seems like it would be a problem. Here in the US when you vote they compare your signature on your ID with the one you put down on record at the ballot place. If it's insufficiently similar I assume that means they can tell you to take a hike or something

I had a minor kerfuffle on a major bank transaction due to my signature not matching. Wasn't the end of the world, but did result in some hassle.

(That was also the day I found out my signature is notably different when writing with a felt-tipped pen.)

I just print my name. I can write cursive script, of course, but I usually don’t day to day: it’s either messy or time consuming.

Realistically signatures have always been forgeable.

How can I escape the tilde character on this site? Backslash does not appear to function in actual posts - just in the comment preview.

test test
\test\ test
/test/ /test/
test test
~test test
test test~~

lol

strikethrough_regex = re.compile('''~{1,2}([^~]+)~{1,2}''', flags=re.A)

Used here

# turn ~something~ or ~~something~~  into <del>something</del>
sanitized = strikethrough_regex.sub(r'<del>\1</del>', sanitized)

Anyway maybe like ~this~?

Which looks like &amp;#126;this&amp;#126;

In unrelated news I'm not sure how much I trust the variable named sanitized to contain what it says on the tin.

ETA: In accordance with the new rules on AI, disclaimer that the escape sequences for tildes was AI generated (and then I verified that the proposal worked).

Ah, the wonders of HTML character entities. Thank you!

~test~

`~test~` ~test~  
`\~test\~` \~test\~  
`/~test/~` /~test/~  
`~~test~~` ~~test~~  
`~~~test~~~ ` ~~~test~~~  
`~~~~test~~~~ ` ~~~~test~~~~

Huh. Doesn't work in the comment preview, but does in the final comment.

Also I really don't trust that comment-parsing code you linked.

On inspection it looks like the "strip disallowed html tags and attributes" step happens after all the sketchy regex stuff so it's probably fine.

Wait, it gets worse. It appears to have escaping problems even inside code tags? For reference, the source of the prior comment was:

`test` test  
`\test\` \test\  
`/test/` /test/  
`test` test  
`~test ` test  
`test ` test~~

...assuming pre works, at least.

EDIT: nope, pre doesn't work either...

Looks like your top-level comment about formatting is filtered.

fixed.

One of the comments in the Quality Contributions Roundup was @Dean's comment about domestic surveillance and bomb-making/terrorism. Assuming we're all already on three-letter-agency watch-lists (i.e., damage done), can anyone elaborate and/or provide sources on what bomb-making materials are surveilled or controlled? (The US Army's TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook (pdf) is probably a good reference for what materials were available to a motivated person in 1969.) My understanding was that the biggest technical challenges of bomb-making were that:

  • Ordnance experts are delighted to tell their fellow chemistry enthusiasts everything they want to know about explosives... except the practicalities of triggering them.

  • Many of the low explosives (Tom Scott video on the difference between high and low explosives) that can be made with minimal chemistry knowledge and experience are more volatile than the application demands, thus are liable to decompose or be unintentionally triggered before they can be deployed, e.g., TATP.

But, so far as small-scale bombs go, I never learned what technical or operational barrier there is to a black powder enthusiast buying x, y, and z from their local home and garden center and assembling such-and-such or this-and-that.

(Have any of you given the agents who monitor you names?)

Edit: Fixed a couple words

Making your own black powder is entirely legal. IIRC, the manufacture and storage limits are something like 25 pounds before the law requires licensing, though I'd imagine your home insurance might have some objections in the event of a house fire claim. Tutorials on making high-quality powder are available on you tube.

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

The obvious question is then how good is 25 pounds of black powder compared to just driving a car into a group of people?

It's not like you can easily pack it very tightly against a building etc since it's, well, 25 pounds, so just slightly smaller than 2 gallons of water.

I'm no expert, but purely by the numbers, the energy density by volume of TNT is only about 33% higher than that of blackpowder, while TNT's combustion speed is 3-6 times higher. I'm not saying that BP is harmless, but constructing a bomb for terrorism purposes using it instead of modern explosives probably requires a much different design.

I'm not saying that BP is harmless, but constructing a bomb for terrorism purposes using it instead of modern explosives probably requires a much different design.

Depends on what the goal and/or target of the terrorist is. Is there an effective difference between dozens and hundreds of causalities? How important is successfully evading law enforcement before and after?

A relatively small number of standard pipe bombs or nail bombs - each containing a couple of pounds of black powder - are devastating in crowds, i.e. the classics in modern terrorism: packed bars, Christmas markets, street events/demonstrations. The chance to escape after is higher than with a truck attack, and the chance to evade detection before is higher than with most more modern explosives.

But yes, if you want the headlines to contain "hundreds" or "thousands", you don't want an empty truck, and you don't want black powder.

Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?

Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…

…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?

Maybe Carol is an asshole.

I think it would be easier to respond if you used concrete examples.

My basic response is that I don't like or dislike people primarily because of their politics, nor am I arrogant enough to think that the virtues I do rate people on inevitably lead to one political conclusion or another.

On multiple occasions, I've had conversations with older "small government conservative" types talking about how we need to "loosen up" on the social axis to try to ally with people in the "small government social progressive" left-libertarian types. I then pointed out, each time, that that "quadrant" in the four-way economic axis vs. social axis space is the least populated, and we'd have much better results appealing to the opposite quadrant of "big government social conservative", which is rather underserved (including pointing to polling data on Hispanic voters and why, despite being Catholic "natural conservatives," they vote Democrat), by letting up on the anti-government, anti-regulation dogmatism in exchange for wins on social issues.

Every time, the response has been horror at the suggestion, and replies about how it would be better for the "communists" in the Progressive ("big government social progressive") quadrant to win, and for us to lose on both social and economic issues, than for us to win on just the social issues. Most the time, they've not been able to give a concrete answer as to why they'd prefer to lose on both axes than win on just the social axis. Just a lot of vague handwaving about how social conservatism without the whole "drowning government in the bathtub," deregulated free market über alles, would somehow be the worst possible outcome, in ways they can't articulate.

(The one time I did get a clear answer, it was that the people in the Progressive quadrant are Communists; but since the alternative to the whole "small government, free markets" side of the economic debate is socialism, the proper term for the combination of social conservatism with socialism is National Socialism, and just as we allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, Communists are always preferable to Nazis.)

My suspicion here is the same as my general answer below:

There is some other important issue or group of issues here that you are missing in which "small government conservative" aligns more closely to "big government social progressive" than "small government social progressive". Likely one where the matter is not publicly debatable for one reason or another. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the 'communist' backlash. Your final assertion there is precisely the sort of thing that can be seen as falling into that category...

You're assuming people can only disagree in six areas.

It may well be that the underlying value-set that shows A-C (but not D-F) also expresses !G, whereas the underlying value-set that shows A (but not B-F) also expresses G - and the person in question values G highly.

This goes doubly so when G vs !G is something that is unlikely to be publicly visible for one reason or another.

(This assumes there is only one such value-set. In actuality it's more like "is heavily correlated with".)

There are probably hidden links between the items. Consider "The government shouldn't subsidize college" vs. "The government shouldn't subsidize college for white people" vs. "The government should subsidize college". That's 61% in agreement vs. 0%, right?

Reading downthread, social issues vs. government size don't have as clear of a link as equality under the law, but it's easy enough to come up with a few that wouldn't make it into normal conversation. Maybe: Small conservatism is "don't take people's money", large progressivism is "give people money", large conservatism is "give businesses peoples' money" and small progressivism is "abandon the core functions of government".

Are you thinking of near and far groups?

Because usually they have other things than their opinion in common, for example class, upbringing, faith, worldview, sex, hobbies, interests and so on.

Most intellectual online reactionaries would find discussing politics with a leftist like Sam Kriss or a liberal like Scott Alexander (both of whom are intelligent, very familiar with online political debate, twitter dissident right arguments, are well read etc) more entertaining than discussing it with a random intellectually disappointing groyper who can only reshare the same 10 /pol/ infographics.

Isn’t that the heretic-heathen, traitor-enemy, outgroup-fargroup distinction?

Probably some of it. But when we add in, say, Dave, who is the opposite of Carol, and agrees with Alice on DEF and disagrees with her on ABC, and Alice thinks Dave is indeed preferable to Bob — rather than a heretic/traitor/outgroup — this can't be the whole story.

Let's see if I can make a table for this:

￢ABC ABC
￢DEF Bob Carol
DEF Dave Alice

Where Alice's order of preference for the other parties is Dave > Bob > Carol, rather than something like Dave > Carol > Bob (that makes more sense in terms of preferring agreement), or even Bob > Dave > Carol (that prizes the heathen/enemy/fargroup Bob over the heretics/traitors/outgroups Dave and Carol).

The table is helpful, thank you.

Consider the following case:

  • I weakly believe ABC.
  • I strongly believe ABC implies DEF.
  • I weakly believe ~ABC implies DEF.

Under this example:

  • Overall I believe {ABC, DEF}, so I am Alice.
  • I weakly disbelieve Dave (he disbelieves ABC, but the rest of his logic is sound based on the different premise)
  • I moderately disbelieve Bob (he disbelieves ABC, and also disbelieves that ~ABC implies DEF).
  • I strongly disbelieve Carol (she disbelieves ABC implies DEF!)

This would result in precisely the order of preference you are puzzled by, no?

Alice is worried Carol might be a prion. She needs to be either refolded correctly like Dave or completely denaturalized like Bob.

Are A-F correlated in any meaningful way? I prefer the interlocutor that just disagrees with me in a consistent, predictable way to the guy that says, "I like to think through each issue" and winds up with an incoherent dog's breakfast of views.

In the case I'm thinking of, yes. Here, "ABC" stand for social issues, "DEF" for economic/government size issues. Specifically, I'm referring to certain "small government conservatives" who express a preference for "big government social progressives" — whom these same conservatives regularly call "socialists" or even "communists" — over "big government social conservatives."

Sounds like the object-level positions are secondary to some underlying value or ethos that is perceived to be shared with Bob but not Carol. In Walterodim's read, this value would probably be "logical consistency." But it could just as well be a certain type of class consciousness: both anarcho-libertarians and socialists have a kind of working-class, artisanal sensibility that values the individual worker's control over what he creates. Or a perceived character feature: maybe they're small-government conservative because they value tight communities of mutual aid, which socialists could also be perceived as chasing even if they go a bit astray with it.

Because people aren't rational. Carol probably smells better, or Bob looks a little creepy.

"Carol" and "Bob" are meant to be stand-ins for groups more than specific individuals — and you got them reversed — but that does kind of fit what I've observed, in that part of disapproving of "Carol" despite her being less in opposition than "Bob" is that "Carol" has a bad reputation, while "Bob" has a lot of PR on his side (see my reply to Walterodim above).

If you were living through a societal breakdown/apocalypse (well, the kind that doesn't immediately kill you) and you had to pick a canine companion, what would you opt for?

It would definitely be a German shepherd for me. Loyal to a fault, smart and intimidating to strangers without being bloodthirsty. I miss mine a lot, but he had a good life and that's what counts. I'd expect a GSD would do a good job keeping you safe.

It certainly wouldn't be my lab, I tell you. An absolute lovable doofus who traded brains for brawn, turning out 50% larger than the average lab.

If I could disable friendly fire against my party and me by training it (because everyone who’s not a doggo racist knows it’s the owner, not the breed): a pitbull.

Not only would it provide excellent deterrent and defense (offense can also be the best defense), it would be a constant heatseeking missile for small game animals, thus providing recurring sources of food. And well, perhaps an occasional baby or child here or there, but hey, meat can be scarce in this apocalyptic wasteland; if they didn’t want to get nannied, they shouldn’t have triggered my sweet velvet hippo by making a sudden noise or movement, or breathed. Even if we don’t consume the long pork, we can use it for trading.

I’d name it Zeus, Rocky, Nala, or Luna and forage for a flower crown for it to wear. It’d be so cute and wholesome 😊

If I had time to train them before the SHTF, a female Rottie.

The well-trained Rottie bitches I have met have been the sweetest, most caring, best behaved dogs I have had the good fortune to spend time around. I didn't piss them off, and I don't want to know what would have happened if I had done, but I am well aware that some ne'er-do-well who threatens the owner's family is going to piss the Rottie off, and have a bad day as a result.

I don't know how much harder it is to train a male Rottie, but I haven't met one I felt entirely safe around.

Generally, male dogs are more territorial and female dogs are more people-protective, with male dogs having the edge in aggression and usually a higher prey drive. That makes a female dog a better choice for a mobile apocalypse survivor but a male a better choice for a determined homesteader.

They were bred to hunt semi-independently, so they don't have the temperament for military/police work that German Shepherds and Malinois are prized for, but Rhodesian Ridgebacks are be another good breed in the "won't freak out and attack family or other non-threats like a pit bull might (I don't want to come across as overly anti-pit bull), but would protect family 95% as effectively as a pit bull" category.

Looking at a combination of size, strength, and controlled aggression, Rhodesian Ridgebacks are some of the most badass dogs I have met. But I wouldn't want to own one.

They're a great breed for households that can handle dogs in that size and energy range, but dogs in that size and energy range and/or with a hunter's prey-drive aren't for everyone.

German Shepherd is a good, overall choice. I'd go for a Husky if I'm in a cold region.

I think a German Shepherd is a really strong choice for the reasons you've mentioned. They're also great pack carriers - I have a friend who backpacks with his. A pitbull isn't going to be able to travel long distances with you as well, and border collies / Austrailian shepherds just aren't vicious and powerful enough as a defensive weapon.

Probably a good yeller dog- trainable, loyal, mostly look after themselves, and boy howdy do they tree game. I had one in high school, just a bit gun shy.

Belgian Tervuren/Malinois.

That's just a GSD with a French accent, but I can get behind that choice haha*

*Assuming original GSDs didn't pick up a mix from living in Alsace.

Behaviorally and mentally, they're completely different dogs, with completely different issues that need to be accounted for.

Plus, I tend to 'click' better with Malinois and Tervurens, from experience. Dunno why.

My lab actually seems like a pretty good choice. She's easily trainable and has natural hunting instincts that are useful with almost zero prey drive. While she's surely not as adept in a combat situation as other dogs, I'm probably already in deep shit if I've arrived at that point, but she's large enough to make someone else an easier target. Their cold tolerance is impressive, they're great swimmers, and they're about as adaptable and flexible across a wide variety of roles as any breed. Ultimately, I think flushing and fetching prey is probably the biggest thing a dog can bring to the table after protection.

Dogs: companions during good times, food during famine. That's what I tell my mutt. She'll have to learn to share the voles and frogs she hunts, if times turn bad.

A poodle. Not as smart as a border collie, but smarter than the vast majority of breeds. At the same time, no one will try to shoot or steal a fucking poodle.

An interesting choice.. I admit that if I ran into a lone survivor in the apocalypse who had made it that far with a poodle for a companion, I'd be second-guessing myself.

Standard Poodles are hunting dogs. Not miniature or toy Poodles of course, just the original ones. Their silly haircut was to keep them cool when running, but with warmed joints.

Don’t the French use full sized poodles as police dogs? They’re crazy smart, I knew one and it was like having a huge furry toddler walking around.

That's why I'll be the guy going through the apocalypse with my bunny. Anyone who'll see me will think "If this guy hasn't resorted to eating the bunny yet, he's got his shit locked down tight and isn't someone to fuck with".

The bluff is worth skipping one paella.

Wait we're skipping paella? What kind of hellscape apocalypse are we expecting here?

A really bad one, for anyone who tries to eat my bunny.

I have no idea of how dogs work. Must I really? I'd probably pick the first one I managed to cooperate with.

Someone please explain how to dog.

A beginner's guide to dogging.

A more intermediate guide can be found here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MXzaVOk_Ydk

This is unhelpful.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The End of Faith. Going through Kuehnelt-Leddihn's The Menace of the Herd, which I can only describe as an oddity, both judgemental and insightful. Backlog is moving slowly.

Almost done reading The Richest Man in Babylon. It's pretty good. Goes to show that most of the wisdom in this world has been discovered by someone, somewhere, long ago.

What's it about?

Going off memory. Change your worldview from saving's as a denial of your income to instead that of "Paying Yourself First". Your saving's are something to be smiled upon and take pride in. Not a prevention of your ability to consume.

For the average person, get out of the cycle of living on whatever is your current income and instead get into the simplest of all possible budget plans.

Save 10% of your income. Pay off your debts. Then, once stable, invest.

It's a bit folksy. Often it's advise is outdated from an era of "just give him a good handshake and explain your situation". But humans intuit stories better than raw lists, and the advise is great for someone who is otherwise winging it at life.

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Saving, investing, paying off debts, becoming rich and staying rich, teaching simple wisdom to others, improving your city's wealth.

It uses named characters from actual clay tablets from ancient Babylon to tell stories as a vehicle for financial advice.

Spice & Wolf in the original. It's pretty difficult because the wolf goddess speaks in such an antiquated manner and because the setting is Medieval Fantasy Europe and therefore very far from slice-of-life Japan. I never read it in English so I'm following along as best I can.

And here I never even finished reading the translated version. Did you think about reading the TL in parallel to help with the difficult bits? (To the extent it's a faithful translation anyway...)

Update: I tried it. It's good as a lookup for when I totally lose track of what's going on, e.g. for a discussion about currency manipulation, or when there's a sentence I just don't get. Reading in parallel doesn't work though, it's annoying and the book doesn't read well in English IMO. The translation is too faithful, it makes the prose beige and the sentence structure kind of choppy.

Thanks for the suggestion, it's good to try new methods.

Back when I started studying Japanese, I made a rule for myself: if it's in Japanese, you do it in Japanese or you don't do it. I can probably relax that a bit now, 8 years after I started, but I'm wary that if I let myself take the easy way I'll never get back to doing things the hard way. I'll give it a try and let you know.

Working on Feersum Endjinn. It's a pity that it's such a slog, but it really is. Mainly because much of it is written in a quasi-phonetic script. It's just far enough from English that I can't just immediately run my eyes over a sentence - I have to stop and focus on individual words. My kingdom for an English translation...

I keep finding myself going 'wait, is this what functional illiteracy feels like?'.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Fiction, and art in general, is capable of articulating sentiments which do not come around often in real life. The artifice is far from "artificial" in the modern sense. So far (I'm only about 80 pages in), Marquez is saying a lot about love and its counterfeits. I'm eager to continue.

I loved this book. Gabo was a genius.

Finished reading Wind and Truth, fifth Stormlight Archive book. It was really not good. Books 3 and 4 had gone downhill so I wasn't expecting too much. Just figured I'd read it since it's the last book of the planned 1st arc. It was rough though. I'm not even sure where to begin criticizing it, every part has issues. It's got some culture war issues, but mostly because Sanderson up to this point has been a prude Mormon author so it feels inconsistent with his previous books. The character arcs go in uninteresting directions that feel like they have low or no stakes and often end pointlessly. Sanderson has never been a great prose writer, but in this book it's bad enough to constantly distract from the story.

It’s a shame, really, because it was refreshing to encounter a fantasy author who delivered straightforward fantasy without forced modern DEI themes. Books 1 and 2 were honestly quite good—classic, heroic epic fantasy done well. However, none of the setups in those books ever pay off. The built up character conflicts just get dropped. The love triangle just fizzles out, and a character's controversial decision is barely addressed. It’s like the characters stop interacting after Book 2. They all seem to have gone on heavy psychiatric medication and started cognitive behavioral therapy, blunting all their emotions and the actions those emotions might inspire. Instead of living and acting through their feelings and getting the self-discovery potential those actions could lead to, they just become distant and introspective, endlessly dissecting their issues in a repetitive, stagnant, psych 101 for dummies style. It's all tell and no show.

I try to imagine myself with Shallan, and I can’t help thinking our individual neuroses would feed off one another in dangerous ways. My sadness fueling her feelings of abandonment when I retreat. Her self-destruction triggering my panic at being unable to help… This quotes a good example. Modern relationship advice, modern language. It might be true that their, "individual neuroses would feed off eachother in dangerous ways." but it's a book, actually exploring that and forcing characters to grow through their interactions is basic storywriting and character development stuff. Characters have conflicts between each other in this book that are resolved without the characters ever meeting.

I kinda wonder if Sanderson just wants to get to his long term over arching cosmere stuff more than he wants to write good books. So everything is getting the short stick and forced into unnatural feeling storylines to keep things on track. No time to write these character interactions, gotta introduce random new cosmere lore! Which is ironic for a series whose moral was supposed to be, "journey before destination."

I thought the book was decent, but a noticeable step down from the previous 4 (which I thought were all excellent). My main gripes were twofold. First, while the series has always had an element of being very heavy handed about mental illness, this one really took it to another level. It felt like everyone's foremost character trait was their mental baggage (to be fair that was always the case for Kaladin but now it's everyone), and as you said it just gets handled in a way that feels very... Reddit, for lack of a better way to put it. Lots of emphasis on therapy and thinking about mental illness in a way that the other books really didn't have. I don't really care for the way he took an interesting aspect of the setting (you need to have some cracks in your soul to get powers) and Flanderized it the way he did in this book.

My second beef was the culture war angle I suspect you allude to, Renarin and Rlain's nascent relationship. It just feels so forced. The series has had gay people in it and that was fine (if a bit anachronistic for the tone of the setting, but so are a lot of things I suppose), but this was just over the top for me. For one thing it feels like it was a DEI box-checking exercise first and foremost - "hey let's not only have a gay romance, but a gay INTERSPECIES romance with an autistic dude!". So this feels very forced in a way that other, similar situations just didn't. But that isn't even close to the biggest problem with it. No, the biggest problem is Shallan playing cheerleader the whole time, culminating in letting out excited squee noises like she's some fucking Tumblr fangirl. It is absolutely insufferable and I very much doubt if I will ever read those chapters again because of it. I feel like Sanderson is spending too much time listening to the Reddit/etc section of his fan base (who I have no doubt eat this stuff up), to the point that I got the sense that Shallan was meant to be an audience stand-in when she got all excited. But I can't stand it. I'm willing to give him a break on this one just because like I said, his other books have been excellent. But if he keeps this shit up I'm probably going to stop reading. It was that annoying to read.

Those two things aside I thought the book was fine. I didn't hate it. But it was a definite step down for me, the first real blemish on his record since Elantris (which was his first book so i don't expect it to be as good as the rest). I can imagine that I would be much more upset if, like you, I hadn't really thought the last two books were that good either. But for me this is just an outlier in quality, one I hope remains an outlier and that he goes back to his usual standard. We'll see.

Yeah that was not subtle. I couldn't stop rolling my eyes at this book in general, and the modern immersion breaking references, but there were a lot of Renarin things that were especially bad. They visit his childhood room and his hobbies were reading and model kit building (omg he's just like redditors!) or at one point he is nervous and if I'm remembering correctly he is basically described as both fidgeting, while spinning a sphere in his hands to distract himself. Fidgeting and spinning...

I think what bugged me the most was something that bugged me about a lot of the other plotlines too, namely the timing It's 10 days before what could be the apocalypse and confronting an evil god and everyone is more worried if their uwu crush notices them, or for Kaladin if they're self-actualizing. Is being a soldier really the right job for Kaladin? Or Sigzil? Maybe they'd be better off as therapists or carpenters. It just felt so first-world problems. You need to meet all those lower needs like not being dead on Maslow's hierarchy first.

Also the entire recreance just turned out to be Humans being bigots and if they had just learned to mate with and love the crab people instead of being slavers everything bad could've been averted Just a really lazy and typical modern plotline that's been done to death. Avatar etc. I like Sanderson's worldbuilidng but the rest I've come to dislike. Too many safe and easy plotlines, (Even evil god turns out to have faked destroying his city, and of course Dalinar doesn't actually have to take a stance on the trolley problem, it's just dodged to be fixed at some later date) so feels written by HR for approval by the overly online crowd. I kinda wish he'd keep worldbuilding but let other authors write some of the stories, since he seems to be getting overwhelmed with all the cosmere stuff with the expanding scope. Need to at least pick up a much more critical editor and get rid of the overly online fandom sourced beta readers.

Still on Montaillou, from which I learned that there's a town in Spain called Stuck my dick in a bottle of Pepsi.

Alright, tell the tale. I had intended to read Montaillou, but now I'm no longer sure it is what I expected.

I'm kidding, it's a town called Peñiscola (so I'm sure it's pronounced more like "pen-YIS-co-LA" or whatever), but I did a bit of a double-take when I saw it.

Just finished Dawn Razed and have moved on to This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7.

I'm still plodding through Blood Meridian. The prose is so goddamn beautiful, but I can't engage with it unless I'm close to 100%. Was listening to The Dead South and they gave me the urge to pick it up again.

Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Nothing else new or particularly interesting so far.

Also reading Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef as more light entertainment. It's pretty heavily red-team coded fiction. As is typical with his books, I enjoy the plot generally, though I find the specific collapse / apocalypse scenarios described to be highly implausible.

I recently finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, which I had read as a child but was unaware (until recently) that my family had an abridged version. It was interesting reading the unabridged, but man... I think that book is better abridged. Verne goes on for pages and pages just listing species of fish that his characters encounter. I would guess that fully 1/4 of the book is just "we saw (insert long list of fish here)". Still a classic, I still enjoyed it well enough, but I doubt I ever read this edition again.

After that I read the first proper Witcher novel, Blood of Elves. I was concerned that I wouldn't enjoy it as much as the short story collections which preceded it, but I did really enjoy it. Still remains to be seen how well Sapkowski develops a story that stretches over several books, but this was good enough that I'm looking forward to reading more.

Next up is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which I said I was going to read a while back but got sidetracked by other things. This time for real though, as I don't have other books to distract me from it any more.

Mainly because of a brief discussion of this series here a while ago, I'm nearing the end of book 4 of The Stormlight Archive. I'm not fond of fantasy, I'm not fond of Sanderson's writing, but I wanted something of reliable quality rather than risk disappointment like with several previous books. So, I was surprised by how engrossed I was by books 1 and 2. Since then, well, not so much.

One particular thing about Rhythm of War drives me mad, because half of the plot hinges on a specific event. There's this hardass commander* that is noted a dozen times per book to be a stickler for military codes, how the troops under him are visibly more disciplined than others, etc. And yet, when the bad guys launch a surprise attack on the single most important stronghold, they kill patrols and sentries on the ground level and then ascend for hours to the tower itself, without anybody noticing. How could his people have missed the outer perimeter going dark for hours? They have instant communications!

*Don't ask me to spell his name, I'm consuming the series as audiobooks. The irony is not lost on me, this is the only time I say: they should have centered female voices.

but I wanted something of reliable quality

oh no. Do yourself a favour and pick up Lyonesse instead. All three books combined are shorter than one of Sanderson's doorstoppers. Vance is everything Sanderson isn't: excellent prose, effortlessly amusing, briskly paced, tight plots and fun characters.

Thanks for the recommendation, though short length is not a plus in my case, the more chores and travelling can fit in one audiobook, the better, so doorstoppers are preferable. (What would the metaphor be for recordings? Cassette libraries?) And, well, it was "reliable" quality, not "good" quality, I didn't want to gamble. Great writing? Or characters who speak like Tumblr users? An enjoyable story about the Kessler syndrome separating Earth and Luna? Or a story where the population of Earth are pollution-loving chauvinists ruled by a rich criminal that is referred to by the narration as "orange man" (real example)?

Dalinar is his name. Kaladin, Shallan, Renarin, Adolin, Jasnah, Szeth. Kholin. What else?

As for the series itself: Sanderson has yet to write a better book than The Way of Kings. Words of Radiance is really part 2 of the same stellar first book, but books 3/4/5 are not the same.

If there's another book of his that's quite good, it's Shadows of Self, one of his less-known works. I always loved that one.

Shadows of Self was the best of the Wax&Wayne series for me, before the Southerners arrive and Sanderson really starts modernising the setting. The villain is great and their goal is something that at least part of you can root for.

I really liked book 3 of the Way of Kings, though. Dalinar's backstory makes total sense, even though it's not what I expected at all, and it explains so much about how people react to him in-universe.

Starting on the silmarilion. Reads a bit like elvish scriptures more than a novel per se.

I've never been able to get into it for exactly that reason.

That's pretty much right. Were you expecting a novel?

What do you think of the tariffs? Just kinda curious to get people’s general vibes.

I’m more excited than anything to see what happens as a U.S. citizen. I am not like in a super precarious place financially but I’d imagine it is scary for those who are.

In addition to all the other ways in which they're dumb, Trump is the one who negotiated the present trade agreement with Canada and Mexico.

What do you think of the tariffs?

Mostly, I'm surprised previous US presidents haven't used the immense economic and geopolitical advantage of their country more.
If you're asking for a moral judgment, history only remembers good victors and evil losers. So if Trump wins, he will be remembered as a good president and vice-versa.
He already forced his will on Panama and Mexico and he'll probably keep 'winning' the same way. There are scant few nations on the planet who can afford to say 'no' when threatened with 25% US tariffs.

I’m more excited than anything to see what happens as a U.S. citizen.

You're excited about prices going up?

Not entirely sure yet, given my naturally pessimistic and "wait-and-see" attitude, but probably more positively-inclined toward them than most here, despite my "super precarious place financially."

As some alternative viewpoints most here probably aren't exposed to, I'll first link this from Conservative Treehouse, "The Secret Tariff Code is Buried in ‘Section 2, Item (h)’ of the Executive Order":

So, Canada and Mexico get 25% tariffs, but China only 10%. Why? The secret is in that subsection “(h)” when it talks about de minimis treatment. Essentially, what President Trump is doing is levying a much more massive import tax, and possible confiscation impact on the core source of fentanyl (and other illegal) substances.

Approximately a billion packages are estimated to enter the USA under the cover of the de minimis exemption. This is where the enforcement mechanism of the “External Revenue Service” combines with the tariff approach and the “state of emergency.” President Trump imposed the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a nearly 50-year law that gives the president sweeping power to impose sanctions after declaring an emergency.

Now the billion packages, mostly from China, Mexico and Canada are going to be subjected to review and interception.

The de minimis loophole comes from back in the 1930s. The idea back then was, say you went on a vacation to Paris, you shouldn’t have to file customs paperwork or pay taxes if you decided to ship some little Eiffel Tower statues to your friends back home.

Congress in 2015 then raised the de minimis threshold from $200 to $800. However, the e-commerce world exploded, and Chinese companies began using the de minimis loophole to ship cheap goods (ex. Temu and Shein) into the USA direct to consumers without paying any customs duty.

It was reported last year that the U.S. was on track to receive a billion packages through the de minimis loophole that aren’t taxed and don’t have customs slips saying what they are. Making matters worse, illegal items are slipping through the cracks, including, knockoffs, unsafe items and even chemicals used to make fentanyl. The worst abuser that exploits this de minimis loophole is, by far, China.

President Trump can require a customs and duty declaration stating what is in every package and subsequently collect tariffs and duties.

Put it all together and President Trump is executing an Emergency Act executive order, plus the imposition of a tariff review, and simultaneous interception of de minimis packages previously unchecked as the enforcement mechanism. All executed by the External Revenue Service.

(Emphasis in original)

And for something a bit more out there (even for me), there's Vox Day's "Testing the Free Trade Hypothesis"

It has long been a mantra of the free trade crowd that both sides lose from a trade war. President Trump has called that mantra into question by launching a trade war with Canada, and likely Mexico and China as well:

…

Conclusion: the USA will handily win a trade war with all three countries, which is presumably why President Trump singled them out. The US economy will observably benefit from removing foreign competitors taking sales away from domestic businesses; the GDP cost to the foreign countries is an order of magnitude greater to them because their interaction with the USA is more parasitical than symbiotic.

…

Remember, the theoretical justifications for free trade have always been false and incorrect, as first demonstrated by Ian Fletcher and then conclusively disproved by me. Free trade is absolutely and inherently detrimental to a nation, because its logic of efficiency and optimally pairing labor with capital absolutely requires the complete destruction of families, local communities, and the demographics of the nation itself.

The fact that decades of even partially free trade within and without the US borders has significantly fostered these three negative societal trends isn’t an accident, it is specifically predicted by my theoretical observations and argument in my 2016 book ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE.

Here is the relevant Presidential order. It’s informative to see that instead of cracking down on its illegal fentanyl production and exports, the Canadian government has elected to embrace trade war. The irony here is that the USA is simply attempting to do what China tried, and failed, to do in the Opium Wars.

As an experiment I opened my first ever position in S&P 500 futures last week and I’m amazed by how quickly it’s gone against me.

Don't feel bad, I bought a hundred shares of NVDA on the dip last week. Can't wait to see how it opens tomorrow

I think it’s pretty stupid to impose protectionary tariffs by executive order without a broad bipartisan consensus. Nobody is going to invest in building a brand new steel mill or whatever if the most-likely outcome is being made obsolete in four years.

This is a great observation. Many of Trump’s goals are dubious because companies cannot handle the policy whiplash between administrations (see: Keystone Pipeline), and ideological opponents will attempt to weather the hostility for 4 shorts years.

Why gut your DEI department when in 4 years we’ll have Mr. Turbo DEI in office, and it’ll be illegal not to have one? Better to rename it for now and keep your head down.

Same for oil and gas companies. No way they build new refineries or whatever when we’ll soon have another Biden who wakes up and decides that gas stoves should he outlawed.

I would say we'll only have Turbo DEI if anti-DEI has proven to be unsuccessful for 4 years. Same for oil and gas - if Trump's next 4 years are largely successful then what's the probability of a President Vance instead of president... probably Cortez with the way the Democrats are heading.

I have yet to see a good justification for how they're supposed to be compatible with fighting inflation. Instead, they look like more of the same "make it so" Trump policymaking that I've been complaining about since 2016, and I expect to see a good dose of leopards eating faces. But maybe that's just me.

I know inflation is just what it’s called when prices get higher, but I don’t understand how all prices get higher just because of a tax. Intuitively there must be someone printing money, or else an increase in dollars spent here would mean fewer dollars spent somewhere else.

In fact I think this is why the Austrian school actually defines inflation as an increase in the money supply. Transfer payments, i.e. taxes, e.g. tariffs, are not inflation.

Right. Not just the Austrians, I think; my high school Econ class was very Keynesian, but I’m pretty sure it used the same definition.

Regardless:

Next, I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.

The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

I think tariffs stand in opposition to this layman’s understanding of inflation because they suppress the supply of consumer goods. If there’s a mechanism by which they do boost supply, or if they actually help the Austrian money-supply definition, I want to hear about it!

The amount of goods and serviced provided can decrease, too. Producers can't lower prices very much without losing money (there's a reason prices are sticky downwards) while consumers can't pay more to maintain consumption (with a stable money supply). So you have less economic activity for the money supply, with inflation as the proportion between them changes for the worst (just on the other side of the equation).

This was one of the reasons that I insist that policy decisions were the major drivers of Covid-era inflation. Not only were massive supplies of money printed and distributed, but governments banned or severely restricted major sectors of the economy for a long period of time. That money is going to go somewhere.

Expect luxuries like lumber and vegetables to get more expensive.

Genius. Reduce the lower and middle income burden with tariffs, especially for luxury goods, and you can redistribute resources from the wasteful wealthy to Americans who need it. Even if it doesn’t revitalize American industry, it improves QoL at the expense of no utilitarian harm.

How does this help lower and middle? Everyone I’ve read says the opposite

It helps producers of the tariffed good and harm's consumers if it. So did you tarrif something like imported liquor over 200/bottle, that would shift margin into US manufacturers which would benefit the company and potentially supply chain.

Liquor isnt the best example because of the long lead time to produce it (for aging).

Beer is a pretty good example that's adjacent to that. Right now, Modelo is one of the most consumed mass market lagers. If you increase the price by 25%, many people will elect to consume fundamentally similar American substitute goods (e.g. Budweiser). Supply lines and distributorships complicate this somewhat, but demand shift would certainly be expected under standard models.

Tariffs are a cost on every consumer, but the revenue of the costs can (hypothetically) go only toward reducing the lower and middle class tax burden. So the cost is compensated only for the < rich. Also, wealthier people are the biggest consumers, and the things they buy cost more, like Canada Goose.

I don't even think it's meant to be a special punitive measure. I mean, it's phrased that way since basically everything in the new US admin is phrased as someone getting punished, but really, Trump's mindset just seems to be that tariffs are a positive good in themselves and the normal status of how things are that US has tariffs against here, there and everywhere, to protect US industry and to collect money (in lieu of using income taxes), as he has said many times.

We're so used to a free trade world where tariffs are a punitive expection (not an infrequent expection to be sure, but still, something that by definition has to be conceived as an expection) that this sort of a mindset starts to seem quite alien to us, even though the world being riddled with tariffs and duties used to be the standard setting to be cleared away by the free trade revolution. The free trade revolution was mostly good and this is bad, but it's also not a special form of bad but rather a very traditional sort of bad.

Braindead stuff. Retaliation is inevitable. He's starting a trade war, and to what end? It will hurt everyone involved. I alternate between thinking of him as a Putin puppet, or a deeply narcissistic grown-up baby. Both go some way of explaining his actions. He seems to want to jerk the US' allies around just because he has the power to do it. In the next round, it of course benefits Russia (and China) when the US alienates the world and isolates from it.

They're widely condemned among economists for good reason. Most econ grad students can cite 7-8 exceptions but these aren't outweighed by the economic costs or don't apply to already developed nations. Best case scenario is that they're just used as threats to receive other concessions.

Best case scenario is that they're just used as threats to receive other concessions

Mexico capitulating this morning suggests your analysis is close to the money. My follow-up is: What do we want from Canada that's equivalent to 10,000 troops at the border?

Apparently, also 10,000 troops at the border, plus a "fentanyl czar." I could've missed something, but as far as I can see, the last-minute concessions agreed to by Trudeau are just all the same ones he'd announced in December, which muddies the picture in figuring out what is really going on. It's at least somewhat likely that Trudeau's December plan was what Trump wanted and Trump just wasn't paying close enough attention to Canada to notice that Canada already gave in to his demands.

But I really don't see any specific thing Trump wants from Canada for these tariffs. Or rather, he keeps adding new justifications for them so often that I don't believe any of them is the real reason. It's possible he really wants to go after Mexico, but can't go after Mexico alone because of CUSMA. It's also possible he faults Trudeau for the trucker protest response or for more personal reasons and just wants to kick him in the ass on his way out. But I'm increasingly leaning more towards the theory that this is the 21st century version of a new emperor demanding fealty from his vassals. It doesn't matter what Canada does, as long as they're seen as giving in.

Tariffs on Canada are incredibly stupid and I haven't heard a coherent defense of them.

Tariffs on Mexico, I'm agnostic about. There are demands to make of Mexico that I support making. Whether tariffs are the best way to get there or not, I don't know.

Tariffs on China are good. Full stop. We should buy less from China.

How strict are the owners of substack in regards to culture war? I'm thinking about starting a blog for reviewing videogames as a hobby and curious exactly where the line is between "spicy" and "permanent ban". I used to do these kinds of reviews on /r/patientgamers but reddit has turned to absolute shit the last few years.
Edit: Consider this question answered, thanks lads 👍

You're fine.

Back in 2023 Jonathan Katz wrote in The Atlantic about Substack's supposed "Nazi Problem". Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, responded.

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.

Even defending having Hanania, fresh off the Hoste reveal, on his podcast.

While it has been uncomfortable and I probably would have done things differently with all the information in front of me, I ultimately don’t regret having him on the podcast.

It's a free speech zone I think. KulakRevolt lives there. So they'll tolerate worse stuff than we will.

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