“I don’t want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing in Iran” is almost a perfect summary of my frustration with Fetterman. I truly feel Manchin took too much shit for his stance but I feel like his brand of moderation was almost picture perfect considering the consituency of West Virginia but when it comes to Fetterman, his brand of moderation feels very misguided.
Like him being very enthusiastic about bombing Iran feels like an unwise moderation that bleeds support from base for almost nothing in exchange…
Why does no one think Fetterman's stroke affected him greatly? He seems like a different person now than he did pre-stroke. He really shouldn't be a senator.
I don't know, I feel like I see people talking about the stroke all the time.
It's true that strokes can cause personality change. The thing about Fetterman was that he had very shallow and superficial philosophical commitments pre-stroke. He had been "in politics" for a while, but as the mayor of a very small municipality. There's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash, and he got famous mainly for being an oddity (bald, 300 pounds) and a media star (went on Anthony Bourdain show) but his political views were pretty scattershot and random. Then he became lieutenant governor, which is a position where you famously don't have to do very much. That kind of blank, uncharacterizable profile appeals to Americans on many parts of the political spectrum, but especially the left, who interpreted a lot of thin, piecemeal evidence as proof that he was a socialist and "anti-establishment," almost like he was their noble savage. In fact, even pre-stroke, nobody really knew for sure where he'd land on a lot of issues once he was pressure-tested.
This is the kind of thing that for me gives Graham Platner the exact same vibes that Fetterman gave off four years ago. You could tell me virtually any story about what kinds of views Senator Platner will be espousing in 2030 and I'd believe it. He could be a communist, he could be an antivaxxer, he could go full white nationalist, he could try to mandate oysters in school lunches - nothing would surprise me.
This is my issue with some people. Like I don't like or agree with Fetterman on some key issues, namely his stance on Iran or ICE. However I'd rather have someone I agree with 75% of the time and is a mostly reliable vote than someone who will give me 0% support and I can't even work with. That unfortunately is the state of governing with our 2 party system and unreasonable Republicans under Trump imo that my more progressive friends can't understand. They'd rather lose elections but be morally superior than have someone in office or a candidate they have to compromise on.
Yes, we live in an atmosphere where voters relate to candidates whose politics mostly consist of scattershot bristling antagonism towards a bunch of things that piss them off too, but otherwise finding ways to come across as an outsider to politics. And the further from center you go, the more widespread the preference for this kind of character.
Obviously, Fetterman isn't Trump, but a lot of the same things were at work in getting these two into office, despite rather obvious limitations. And then, shock of all shocks, people like this turn out to actually be loose canons you can't depend on to think things through.
But with the print era pretty much over, I think they are harbingers of what majorities are likely to be electing. Reflective candidates who consider practical consequences, political and otherwise, come across as not just boring but actually the new image of corrupt. Inauthentic. I mean, I think Dems will learn their lesson regarding Fetterman, but not in general about candidates.
Fetterman isn’t moderating. He is poking his finger in the eye of Progs after Omnicausers repeatedly harassed him at his home (while giving Republicans a complete pass.)
Like Manchin, with all his flaws, he was a partisan Dem who break with party for mostly unpopular stuffs at his home while Fetterman and Sinema, their passion project feels very misaligned
A big mistake is the belief that a 60 vote Democratic Senate has a bunch of additional north east/west coast style progressives. The reality is it has 8 or 10 Manchins who win in their state for parochial reasons, code conservative on a number of social issues, but will vote for Democratic judicial nominees and to expand/clean up holes in Medicaid.
I think many partisans hold an expectation is even more crazy than east coast or west coast progressive. At least the ones online… but I suspect this is an evaporative effect of people getting tired of outrage politics and opting out.
Another reason MY is so correct that both Presidentialism and the Senate itself were terrible missteps on the road to a functional democracy. We got only one-and-a-half out of three branches right...
This is probably true but there are plenty of Democratic senators from the upper Midwest (and Georgia, and the Southwest) who don’t come across like Manchin.
It’s a normal reaction to double down and get defensive. The level of delusional outrage over… thumbsing down Bernie’s $15 minimum wage rider that couldn’t be included in the budget reconciliation, just shows how far Prog extortion politics went. So excessive.
When my son hits his little sister for taking his Pokemon cards, that's a normal reaction but also I am clear that it's not acceptable. When a grown adult and US senator adopts that approach it's worse.
Yeah, it gets unjustifiable when it aggravates people like me, who don't like Progs or Omnicausers and had nothing to do with them. If you're going to be spiteful, you've got to at least keep your spite narrowly tailored. Instead, the common and natural reaction for lots of relatively moderate Democrats is going to be to poke *their* fingers in *his* eye.
Yea like I def agree it is a normal reaction and I think it def was counterproductive for progressive to act that way but him doubling down and becoming defensive like making things worse imo
Like you don’t have to match the energy (and I’m not saying just caving to prog’s demand either btw - I think it is much smarter to pick fights. And this applies to both sides in this case
Lots of people are not super smart or healthy about these things. One aspect of the “Great Awokening” is how many normal people got pushed into crazy rabbit holes and contrarian opinions.
And now knowing a guy at phd who basically polarized against most obnoxious type of campus left and end up becoming basically “most off-putting campus activist with libertarian ideology”, this feels very relevant (I feel like, while I feel very bad for him to have such an experience, him becoming also obnoxious is not helping…)
It's perfectly reasonable to adopt a policy that if someone comes to my house and harasses my kids that I will do everything in my power to ruin whatever cause they stand for.
No, that's not reasonable, that's a version of honor culture or vigilantism.
In the words of Bernie Sanders to the nitwit who is replacing Kristi Noem, "You're a United States Senator, act like it."
If you want the privilege of being an elected official it comes with costs, part of them is people are allowed to harass you within the law, and the people who go beyond what's allowed get punished by the legal system, not by your personal revenge that also includes doing societal damage.
I can’t relate to how people who became a Senator—surely one of the 1000 most powerful people on the entire planet—still feel aggrieved. I really started having a low opinion of Fetterman after reading this interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/magazine/john-fetterman-interview.html
Fetterman: “I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me.”
Despite his last sentence you can just feel the disappointment. Seems like despite his image he was chasing glamor. And how are you so greedy that you are disappointed from being one of the most powerful people on the planet just because you still watch Netflix and eat salmon and ketchup??
It seems like he suffers from severe depression. That kind of focus on the negative and fatalistic thinking is a classic symptom. I know he’s had to seek inpatient treatment for it in the recent past.
Of course, maybe you shouldn’t be a US Senator if you have major mental health issues.
He’s also quite like Sinema in that his personal behavior is highly alarming. The recent story about Sinema playing homewrecker went way too under the radar and in retrospect, provides an easy answer for why she made zero effort to fight for her job.
Every time advocates for a political cause have to keep on expending energy complaining that people are avoiding the logical outcome because they are pissed at the advocates, the advocates really should look in a mirror and say "how can we be less annoying?"
Progressives used to love Fetterman though. He was the progressive candidate when he ran. You can’t blame his changing on progressives when he was the one who changed first.
Progs love the stabbed in the back narrative. They did the same crap with Sinema. They pulled the same stuff on Fetterman. Turing friends into enemies.
So is his motivation there poking fingers in the eyes of the Progs too?
I guess I'm skeptical of divining motivations. He's certainly on the right of the Democratic party, but I don't think we need to come up with complicated psychological reasons to explain it.
Nah I disagree - Iike it’s not like all of his instincts are misaligned or wrong (like him calling for border security was a great call, defending ICE agent at the wake of first incident? Def not so much. And him going all in for Iran warfare, considering the war is already underwater is not a type of moderation we need imo.
Countries not understanding their near neighbours is a common problem. Britain similarly spends lots of its elites' time and energy on the Middle East, as well as following US politics and topics of global concern (eg climate change, development aid etc). But European affairs is so poorly regarded we essentially Brexited by accident, and then spent years in torturous negotiations with the EU because we don't understand how the EU functions or what parts of the relationship are valuable.
Similarly my understanding is that post-Soviet states were a low status desk for Russian diplomatic and intelligence officials prior to 2022, and this low investment contributed to poor quality information feeding up into the top of decision-making over the past decade or so.
My theory is that there's a combination of elites believing they understand nearby countries inherently without having to do much work or invest much in it, and them learning the language of their near neighbours doesn't provide the same payoffs as learning/speaking English or something more exotic. A world where more top British politicians spoke French and German, more top US politicians spoke Spanish, and more top Russian officials spoke Ukrainian and Kazakh is probably a better one.
I think foreign policy elites believe their job is different from what normies think their job should be and so when normies get control in either country you have "unexpected" discontinuities.
Maybe part of this is that nearby nations are just boring. For example, Kipling wrote tons of poems about European stuff and no one reads them. His poems about the colonies are much more exciting.
Конечно. But they are speaking it less and have been for some time. If you only engage in these countries as a monoglot Russian speaker, there's a whole bunch of pro Western and nationalist things that you cannot engage with or understand. It's similar to how there's only so much monoglot English speakers can understand even pro-Western countries like Mexico or Japan.
Part of it is post-imperialist. Russian elites think Central Asia is their playground and birthright. Similarly for Britain and Ireland. Somewhat similarly for the US and Mexico.
I don't have any numbers here but my casual experience is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German so I'd expect this would apply to their top politicians.
We're of course worse for not speaking Spanish although that is changing.
Nick Clegg speaks French, Spanish and Dutch, to pick one example that I know.
A lot of the British upper class speak good French (partly because of the schools they go to, partly because they tend to ski in France or French-speaking Switzerland), so when the Tories are in power, the language skills tend to be better than when Labour are. German is probably number two, but a chunk less common. And there are quite a few who think they speak Greek but don't (they learned Ancient Greek and they've forgotten a lot more than they think they have).
The UK Foreign Office is dominated by foreign-service types and doesn't have a lots of monoglot desk-bound analysts the way the US State Department does, so language skills there are usually very good: the big problem is that while the Embassies in Europe are very high-prestige, the desks in King Charles Street are not (the Middle East and Asia desks are much bigger deals). Part of this is just that Paris Embassy is much easier to contact than the Baghdad Embassy, so UK-based decision makers tend to just call Paris rather than the France desk in KCS, while they'd talk to the Iraq desk in KCS in preference to calling Baghdad.
The UK foreign policy establishment outside the FO is a different story; there's the Europe lobby (Best for Britain, European Movement, etc) which is entirely separate from the FP establishment (Chatham House, etc).
The best next change for American healthcare policy would be to get rid of employer-sponsored health insurance and make the entire country one giant insurance market, but no one is touching that with an 11-foot pole.
Relatedly, I've thought for several years that there is a tremendous irony that on a Venn diagram about 95% of the circle of people believing, "Gender affirming medicine should be completely exempt from government regulation," overlaps the circle of people believing, "The US government should provide universal health care."
Very true! The political implications aren't nearly the same there though because an abortion is a "one-off" event, versus something that is theoretically a several decades' long course of treatments.
Maybe, but the idea that a Republican administration governing over a nationally-run healthcare system wouldn't zero out abortion seems unlikely to me. It's one thing for Trump to give the pro-life folks the back of the hand on forbidding abortion in blue states; it's another thing to actively support abortion.
Right, I'm not disputing that at all? The point is that the issue of changing federal funding and defunding for abortion between administrations is very different due to the fact that an abortion is a singular event -- you can't be continually having an abortion across multiple political cycles where you need to deal with changes in policy between administrations or changes in control of Congress. (Abortions are also not subject to the degrees of gradation that gender affirming care is.)
Yes, this is actually the best argument against the UK NHS. The subsidised-and-regulated mandatory insurance model (where, in many cases, the insurers are not allowed to be for-profit) that is common on the European continent is far more stable in the face of political risk.
Yes, the government is getting increasingly annoyed that stopping trans people from getting hormones through the NHS doesn’t actually stop them getting hormones.
And they can’t ban the hormones themselves, because they’re used by lots of cis people (e.g. oestrogen is in the contraceptive pill).
Switzerland's insurance is split by the Canton. (So strike one on the countrywide marketplace for insurance idea)
Every resident of Switzerland is legally obligated to carry insurance. (Wait, this is not part of the nationalize insurance to solve everything plan?)
The cost of this insurance varies by the Canton of residence. So high cost Cantons like Zurich, Geneva, Basel, have monthly premiums that run around 500 CHF (643 USD) per month. + Or - 100 per month based on the deductible. Even the lower cost Cantons still run at 350 CHF. Cantons are tiny. Zurich is the biggest by population and it has only 700,000 people.
Now where is that premium cost coming from? The magic of the market in the capitalist banker's paradise of Switzerland?
No. They didn't get their money by being the kind of idiots who believe in a free market for health insurance.
Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.
Companies can offer supplemental insurance that covers beyond the basic insurance. Policy holders have to ask for this and pay extra for it. Companies can decide whether or not to cover a patient with supplemental insurance.
That is how the Swiss insurance system works and it has little relationship to a market based system beyond there being private companies who provide the coverage.
Sounds a lot like Obamacare. I agree with you general premise that health insurance outside the US is not solely regulated by free market principles, but neither is it in the U.S. Even non-Obamacare plans need to get permission from state regulators to raise premiums, and they still need to keep their medical loss ratios above the ACA floors.
My opinion: It's probably a mistake to place so much focus on the payer side of the equation. That's not to say there isn't some juice there, but most of it was squeezed by ACA. If we really want to bring down costs then we probably need to look where the majority of healthcare dollars are spent (Hospitals and Physician services). Unfortunately that means grappling with the reality that US doctors and nurses make significantly more money than their foreign contemporaries.
I never saw evidence that the ACA was modeled after Switzerland.* But the similarities were heavily discussed both at the time and during the "ramp up" after passage.
*I personally think Switzerland was a major model, but saying it was modeled after Romneycare made much more political sense.
That is the lower hanging fruit, but to take the idea of medical loss ratios.
Obamacare set the floor at 85%.
Medicaid and Medicare run at ~98%. Most other countries also run at ~>95%.
That 10% medical loss ratio is pure graft from the patient dollars to providers pipeline. They don't add anything that makes patients healthier or their care cheaper.
It's just that we here in America KNOW that private organizations are always more efficient than the government so we are happy to ignore the mountain of evidence which says, in health care, that they aren't.
I take your figures to be generally correct. I would add however that they probably only apply to Medicare part B in the US, and basic guaranteed plans in other countries. Most people covered by these plans also carry supplemental insurance (80% of Swiss citizens have supplemental health plans). I suspect when considered in total, the MLR would be somewhat lower. The MLR's for Medicare Advantage plans is around 90% and for Medicaid managed care plans (used by about 75% of recipients) the MLRs are around 91% (https://www.kff.org/medicare/health-insurer-financial-performance/#7f9ce44b-5b2b-4d3c-ba10-0aec57596a77).
I'm all for eliminating waste (graft??), but I think it would be optimistic to expect more than 5% savings from going after insurance admin bloat. 5% is nothing to sneeze at, but is it worth the political risk of completely transforming the US healthcare system? I'd also add that when all was said and done, the US would still have the worlds most expensive healthcare.
“Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.”
Sounds nice, but you still have to contain costs or this will just lead to a run up in premiums or companies leaving the market like California and Florida have for homeowners.
The basket of things that have to be covered is set at the federal level. There is also a sort of support payment system from the government for those companies which happen to end up with the costliest patient pool.
Employer-provided insurance is market-based insurance.
Competition between insurance providers for the business of employers, or between employers over the generosity of employer self-insured plans, is the main market signal we have for what share of their income Americans want to spend on healthcare.
But it's a very imperfect, weak signal, because the actual consumers of healthcare only have indirect feedback, such as by complaining to their employer about the quality or cost of the insurance the employer has chosen to offer.
Unfortunately employer group plans where all the buying decisions are made by employers are the only real way in our current system that individuals can participate in buying groups that pool their bargaining power against insurance providers.
But we could create other types of patients buying groups, so that people could join an insurance buying group unrelated to their job, instead of negotiating on their own as an end individual with the insurance company.
It works very well in the US. The problem is the political obsession with the 5-10% of uninsured. A lot of problems with US healthcare are actually anti-market regulations.
Those are the exact issues making US healthcare more expensive but making insurance companies the main villain works better politically than making doctors, regulators and other supply side parties the villains.
Multiple Sclerosis drugs which you take for the rest of your normal length life, cost 68k to 120k in the United States. This doesn't even count MRI's and neurologists.
In your opinion does a person with MS but no insurance have "access to healthcare?"
That doesn’t make it true. Lots of books have been written on trans ideology but that doesn’t make it a major issue in the US. A lot of people voted for Bernie who regularly lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The quality of healthcare in the US is pretty good. The high cost is related to poor anti-market regulations and the fact that US is a rich country. Lots of the uninsured have opted out of the healthcare system because they’re healthy and it costs a lot. They can still go to the emergency room.
“ if you met a childless person who earned a high wage but only worked 20 hours a week because he didn’t value money very much and just wanted to focus on Call of Duty”
I feel seen.
“ There is simply no major mass-transit system in the world that works on the basis of free buses.”
so the debate trick would have been to ask you for a list of cities that just qualify as "major" and then find the one that has lower daily ridership than Luxembourg.
I'm curious why you're so adamant that something that would be the #79 metro area in the US -- if you throw in tourists -- just beating out Colorado Springs and Little Rock, Arkansas, counts as "major".
And without tourists it would be #88 just beating Ogden, Utah, and Wichita, Kansas.
Seattle's buses don't stop at the city limits so Seattle's size isn't the right metric. King County Metro is Seattle's primary public transit system and services 38 cities in addition to Seattle.
The size of the MSA is still imperfect but closer to the true measure of the size of serviced population.
That’s the point. Luxembourg has the same daily ridership as Seattle. It would literally be.a top 10 system in the U.S. that makes a case for “major” you are proving my point
I meant 100,000 visitors on a given day. Last year Luxembourg had over 3 million overnight visitors. All of whom presumably used its mass transit (even the airport train is free.)
I’d seriously consider taking a job that paid me half as much as I make now but only required 20 hours a week to work, if it could offer the same level of benefits. I’d have to move to a less nice apartment but the lifestyle benefits seem nice. The issue is few such jobs exist, and even when they do they rarely offer health insurance or PTO.
To be fair, your take-home pay would be less than half your current amount because your benefits would mostly need to remain at the same level. I see this as a nine-month-salary professor, for example. My summer paychecks, which come from my research grants, are noticeably larger than the rest of the year.
what happens when you work for yourself is that (depending on the field and market etc.) you can vary greatly on how busy you are...with 100 hour work weeks and 10 hour work weeks.
That’s the dream. It seems like it takes a lot of hustle in the early years to get a business off the ground the though, before you can take advantage of that flexibility.
My assumption is the particular 20 hours per week I work would still be pretty fixed and not flexible, so it would be something five 4 hour days a week. So if I got sick, I would need to take time off. Since I’d be making less money, taking unpaid time off for sickness would be even less tolerable.
Also, I’d like to still be able to take real vacations occasionally where I get to disconnect from work completely. Even if I was working three 6.5 hour days per week and had four-day weekends, that’s not enough time to travel to Europe, for example.
Ah I was thinking more along the lines of needing to bill 20 hours a week and there be flexibility around those hours. Or, take a week off and work 40 hours the following week.
The key to doing this, and it can be done, is to have it seemly for the client. You make it work and if that means you have to get up early at the hotel in Paris and work 4 hours, you do it.
That would depend on one being able to shift one's hours around. Also, it doesn't solve the sick leave issue, since one can get sick at unpredictable times.
Remember that at least one of the reasons for paid sick leave is to discourage people from working while they have a disease that can infect other workers or customers.
Oh I certainly wouldn't try to conclude that free buses are a good idea anywhere else.
Now in terms of defining "major", Luxembourg's daily ridership (about 350,000 a day) is equivalent to Seattle and and more than say Denver or Portland.
Luxembourg does not have free buses and paid-for non-buses, which is the proposed model for NYC. It has free everything.
Alon Levy's point (which Matt linked) that the important thing is for buses and subways to be the same fare so you don't get people switching between the two for financial reasons is a very strong one. If there's a bunch of money to spend on lowering fares in NYC, the best thing that the MTA could do with that money would be to lower MetroNorth and LIRR fares to be the same as subway/bus fares within the Five Boroughs.
Proposing free subways in NYC is so obviously unaffordable that no-one dares mention it and it will clearly never happen; there are a handful who think free buses will be a first step to free subways, and a bigger group who claim to believe that, but they mostly know it won't happen and some rather like the idea of segregating the scary poors on the buses so the subways (which they use) can be kept for people like them.
I've yet to talk to one person who has a real, workable idea about how to pay for that proposal as well that doesn't include raising taxes on everyone, or just their specific set of rich people that they don't like.
I’m the guy who, every time this idea is raised in a Philly-related subreddit, has to point out that increasing bus frequency and reliability such that a poor commuter only needs an emergency Uber once every 2 months instead of once every two weeks will save said person far more money annually.
If we had $200M a year of funding to replace our farebox recovery, that should be the absolute fucking last thing SEPTA does with it.
I'm with MY on [not] bombing Iran, and maybe it is generational. Over the last 8 or 10 years I've come to realize how much my alignment with the Democrats is really born of things that were happening during the Bush 2 administration. The party and broader left was a much more hospitable place in those days for socially libertarian dudes who also thought American society could be improved with a more coherent, social democracy-lite version of the federal government. I still think it's the correct way to do things on the merits but the older I get the more homeless it feels.
I think any younger people who are expecting something better to come out of the Iran situation probably would be well served to read up on experience with Iraq in the 90s. We had regular air strikes and missile attacks for years and it never achieved anything. A lot of the rationale for the eventual invasion was that the kind of war we are currently seeing against Iran is unlikely to succeed (going in on the ground is of course even worse).
It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
The conundrum of the Iranian campaign comes from the conflicting forces:
-- The administration believes that continued air attacks extended over time will increase the pressure on the regime and lead to its downfall
-- The Air Force/Navy's attack plan presumably goes after the highest priority targets first and the longer the campaign goes on the lower the value of targets that can be hit.
This is why air campaigns are a poor bet to lead to regime change. You really need massive ground forces that go in there and complete the job.
> This is why air campaigns are a poor bet to lead to regime change. You really need massive ground forces that go in there and complete the job.
100% agreed on all your points, regarding this point. I just wanted to add how tough that would be for a country as large as Iran with 92M people as well. There is no way that would go over well.
I wonder how much of this is just social media making “normie” views more accessible. Like when the Internet first came out, civil libertarians were the first adopters and it seemed like EFF-type views were widely held, but I’m not sure that ever actually impacted Democratic politics. Maybe those views never had any real influence and it’s just more obvious now that everyone is online.
>It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
I can think of at least one major exception to this rule. Our intervention in Grenada lacked international backing (I believe even Thatcher opposed it) and congressional approval but Operation Urgent Fury was a major success. The differences between Iran and Grenada are too obvious to be worth mentioning, just pointing out that foreign policy rarely comes with clear rules for success.
The lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan is "don't commit thousands of troops to a decade(s)-long invasion and rebuild", not "don't bomb people far away". I'm surprised how Matt and many others keep missing that. I expect that if Trump sends troops into Iran, his approval will completely crater up to and including potential impeachment.
Sorry, I just realized you said Iraq in the 90s, not the 00s. I see where you're coming from now. To that point, I would offer (1) it did achieve goals like getting Iraq out of Kuwait, (2) Saddam wasn't removed, and (3) it was over 30 years ago and the situations are only superficially comparable. I'm not trying to offer a strong justification for the current action but rather just say that it's also not clearly unwarranted either.
I think one could really dig into the weeds and come up with a case (not that the Trump admin is doing that).
I just also think it's fair to say that after having these kinds of engagements in the region for the better part of 40 years the burden of proof is pretty firmly on anyone who thinks it's going to be different this time.
Yes, but this time the Israelis are involved, so they likely know something. They seem much better at planning Middle East escapades than the US at this point. I doubt even the MAGAs are dumb enough to trip into some sort of Iraq quagmire.
Israel is good at quick short term tactical successes, in part due to its military prowess but in part due to its willingness to take a 'let God sort em out' approach to these fights, then leave all of the long term messes and fallout to other people (mostly America). Their involvement makes this worse, not better.
I agree that the chances of a quagmire remain low largely because there was 0 attempt to make the case for this to the American public and there is no popular support for a real invasion. But we should not be blind to the way one escalation and counter escalation tends to justify the next. Once shots are being fired it is always easier to justify doubling down than pulling back.
An Iran that can't feed its people, cascades into years of civil war with refugee flows that impoverish its neighbors, and makes everybody mad at the US, may not be Israel's goal, but it's not not their goal.
Israel does plan better. But they can have a goal that is just "Leave Iran a bombed out husk unable to project power." and call it a day. That is a win they can sell to their people.
That goal is profoundly unsatisfying to Americans and not seen as worth it.
Yeah, I frankly look at what happened in Syria with the refugee crisis and figure this would be 10x worse, and I don't think its worth it. Plus it seems like Bibi is foaming at the mouth to make every city in Iran a cinderblock and I think that is pretty terrible and creating a whole new generation of potential terrorists doesn't seem great to me...
An Iran unable to project power would be better than the status quo antebellum. A friendlier Iran would a new government would be best, however. I think that's true for both the US and Israel.
Almost half the mailbag devoted to just one question is kind of impressive. I wish I could get a question like that in! Wrt the actual answer, I think one doesn't have to go full Graeber to recognize that a great deal of time-on-the-clock is not really "job", it's work to enable the Real Work(tm) to get done. Meetings and paperwork (sadly still in abundance working grocery, it's farcical), filing interdepartmental memos up and down the chains of command, servicing customers. Not that that latter's not a real function of the job, to be sure, but there's a very real sense in which having a friendly meandering conversation with the kindly grandmother at checkout funges against filling empty shelves. You can intentionally overstaff to provide such slack...but then we're moving away from the 15 hour week by encouraging more "consumption".
There are also hard physical limits to ekeing out efficiencies when demand is inconsistent. Like, yeah, as a popular grocery store we know which days we'll probably need to schedule more staff. (I don't understand why everyone and their mother shops on Sundays?) But to actually get that down to an hour-by-hour estimate...I mean it's doable in theory, but no one wants to work "weird" hours like 7 to 2, or show up just to bag for a couple hours due to surge demand, or whatever. And if you're wrong, then you end up with a few unfortunate souls on the sales floor dealing with constant customer queries, lines stretching into the aisles, and the truck driver's tapping his watch thinking to himself, ugh, I gotta drive back to Central Warehousing and these jabronis are making me wait cause there's no one qualified to use the forklift. Not great, Bob!
Finding meaning outside of work is a whole other thing though. People tend to just handwave it away as "leisure", and of course I'd love to have more time on the margin to kick back and listen to Boris albums on repeat or whatever. Only so much ass-sitting before restlessness kicks in though. There is so much work to get done in the world, whether we officially call it "work" or not, and sooner or later I feel called back to the fight. None of us are free from toil until everyone is free from toil.
What full on radicalized me against corporate America was when Walgreens started doing just-in-time scheduling for pharmacy technicians and forcing us to send techs, most of whom needed the hours, home early on days when they were scheduled if the computers thought we weren’t doing enough business to warrant them. Of course those lull times were the only times a lot of maintenance and housekeeping type tasks could be accomplished in the chronically understaffed stores.
JIT scheduling is evil. I’m glad that where I work now doesn’t do that.
A lot of healthcare requires having some sort of labor slack because of the harms associated with not providing reliable services. If you work at a trauma center, you need (and are paid to have) a team available to take care of an emergency surgery with zero notice. But those workers aren't generally just twiddling their thumbs. They're usually doing other tasks that are important but can be temporarily deferred (coordination/scheduling stuff, for example).
We all know examples of "fraud, waste, abuse" and have examples of what we'd consider low-yield resource usage. But even private equity firms have realized that it's pretty hard to trim things without significant degradation of service quality (and sometimes just end up closing a facility instead).
I've worked at union and non-union places. The c suite is always trying something. The main difference is that in union places we see strikes, in non-union places they face crushing labor shortages (because people will switch jobs). Economics always wins.
Yeah, we're straight up not allowed to do that...clocking out early is voluntary. Might still get an "attendance point" docked, but every once in awhile Dancing With The Stars align and we get done with half an hour or more to spare before official close. So then the question is asked, do you wanna stay and do housekeeping stuff like peeling discarded produce stickers off the floor, or do you wanna forfeit a bit of pay to go home sooner? "Fortunately" there's always infinity delayed maintenance to take care of at a grocery store, so there's work if one wants it...it just might not be pretty or fun. We too have that metric, uh..."sales per employee hour" or whatever, and it's remarkably hard to get that number down. Sometimes I honestly suspect we do the airline booking thing and intentionally over-schedule with the expectation that X number of staff are gonna call out/be late/leave early. Very rare that no one does. I've come to appreciate the role of middle management more as well, since they really are a limiting factor on production...even at a grocery store, there are simply too many responsibilities that must (policy- or legally-wise) be done by a manager only. So you don't ever mess with their hours or things go organic pear-shaped really quick.
Covid was a really weird ad absurdum in this regard, since customers would descend like locusts to buy all the things, and then you had all this dead time with nothing much to do cause store was literally cleaned out. But you can't send people home yet, cause as soon as the delivery truck arrives it's all hands on deck to restock the entire place. So then we'd, like, bust out the power washer to deep clean the produce fridge, or scrub graffiti out of the bathrooms, or whatever. This was also the only time period when they lifted the cap on OT, which is otherwise strictly controlled. That's the flip side of JIT scheduling, if you don't let people do occasional OT when it's warranted, then you aren't *really* covering all the in-time and work gets pushed off to the future anyway.
Blame Freddie. For everything he's wrong and rude about, the man has impeccable taste in music, and I'd much prefer his playlist to Matt's. (Will find it highly amusing if FdB also ages into "eh, my son likes pop music, I guess it's not so bad after all".)
I'd love to see them live if I had the hearing capacity to spare, hah. Slowly getting tinnitus over time from work has made me a lot more cautious in how loud I blast my beats, and I am told they're probably the 2nd loudest band in the world. It's disturbing to actually miss conversations sometimes because a critical mass of phonemes gets dropped. Too youngish for that!
I think Slow Boring precisely shows that jobs are less lumpy. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters, if they are all half price and half as often I think that would be straightforwardly better for me. And also "writer who produces a couple columns a week in conjunction with several others" is the most successful model in journalism -- that's the NYT op ed page, for example.
Most jobs do not have to be lumpy though—people could work European hours and vacation norms and things would still run. Most people would be a lot happier working less and retiring later over our current system where you burn yourself out while working dreaming of retiring early (sometimes extremely early like the FIRE folks) then are retired with nothing to do.
I need to be working at least as hard as my peers or I risk losing this job. If that happened I would lose my healthcare and potentially have my resume scarred in a way that moves me down the ladder. That would be bad, so I work hard to avoid it. Most people do - and thus none of us get to work less.
Unfortunately the prisoner’s dilemma extends across countries too. For a while, it was the US defecting at Europe’s expense. Now China’s defecting even harder at the US’s (and Europe’s) expense.
We still live in a world where employees working harder is a competitive advantage.
Yes, this is where some policy intervention comes in to nudge things in the direction of allowing for leisure. Lower hour work week before overtime kicks in, revisit rules on exempt/non-exempt status.
Something like a sabbatical fund if one has worked 56 of the last 60 quarters for time off/retraining. (Spitballing)
I think Matt's cultural frame is important as well, like parental leave is now seen as much more valid than it used be.
I understand the sentiment, but when the motive is competition with your peers, I have doubts about how effective interventions can be.
Like literally this weekend, no one is FORCING me to work but I probably will. Same for my wife. That's just how better paying white-collar jobs are these days. There's no overtime or anything, just cultural expectations and not wanting to fall behind my peers.
I hear people say things like this a lot, but it’s not inevitable. Most of my friends are upper middle class white collar workers, and I can only think of two who are routinely working more than 40-45 hours per week. You do probably have to accept being more like 80th percentile in income rather than 95th, but it’s accessible if you prioritize it.
I feel this. My company has 'unlimited' PTO and the result is that I am never off even when I am off. Though I also don't really get too mad about it as long as I'm treated like an adult/trusted to get my stuff done without micromanagement. There's a point where it comes with the territory.
No, not really. I just realized I didn't need to do it. If I went back in time and skipped that weekend-work, with a few specific exceptions were something was on fire, I'd be in the same place economically today.
I don't know your or your wife's situation, so this isn't a comment on your situation.
But, the indications are pretty clearly that a lot of knowledge worker time isn't all that well spent in the office or on the clock. Meetings come up as being big time sucks with limited productivity.
For me, my most stressed and time crunched work environment was one with long unnecessary meetings with too many people at each one. Basically pushed a bunch of my real work after hours and weekends, it was a huge problem.
There's also the inefficiencies of part-time work.
If a doctor takes 3 hours to do a surgery, she can work 18 hour weeks doing 6 a week, or 60 hour weeks doing 20 a week.
Say you become an expert at the surgery after doing 2000 of them. The second doctor will hit that in 2 years, and then do 1000 expert surgeries per year.
The first will take almost 6.5 years to hit that level.
And this ignores the years of education we require of doctors.
When I owned that restaurant fire protection business the entire business was built off # of inspections performed per day per technician. It was ~ all variable but our techs mostly worked 40 hour weeks. Some wanted weekend overtime work. They could have worked fewer hours and earned less but they didn’t. My sense is most people wouldn’t actually be a lot happier working less **and** earning less. Which is the tradeoff vs. Europe.
This is why people are so outraged when back to office mandates kick in - for several years, the desktop PC class found the cheat codes to working less while making the same money, and losing that flex feels like a true net loss.
I suspect it would be hard on small business. Just going off of where I grew up, there are lots of 2-4 person businesses where it’s a hardship when someone takes vacation. 4 weeks or so would make it even tougher.
Not a reason not to do it, but we should understand where blowback might come from.
There are lots of jobs that work with European hours but it is the case that for high productivity jobs there are increasing returns to productivity to investing more time (until you reach burnout in which case productivity falls dramatically off a cliff). A project with ten engineers will not go twice as fast as project with 5 engineers (in fact it might go slower) and 9 moms will not produce a baby in a month. By dint of practice a lawyer or surgeon who takes on extra cases will become better on average compared to the one who takes extra vacations.
What a treat to drink my coffee perusing the mail bag and see a question from my son about an 18th century Dutch essay I have never heard of be answered. Thanks Slow Boring — it’s hard when your kids grow up and move away but you are connecting us in unexpected ways.
"Something I noticed while going over these questions, though, is that while I think Slow Boring readers mostly agree with me about most stuff (that’s not so surprising), one of the exceptions is that the commenters seem to be significantly more hawkish than I am."
I think you should have polls on this. I suspect that people who are animated by the Gaza debate are more likely to comment on this. There may be a silent majority that doesn't care enough to comment.
I actually think there's a certain groundedness to be gained from doing at least some household work. To be sure, I'm not about to throw away my washing machine, but I also think doing the dishes and cleaning up clutter around the house does give me some kind of buy in to the communal space of the home, facilitating co- ownership of the space. I think having robots do all that work actually could take something away that helps keeps us human.
It's interesting to contrast MattY's view here toward the benefits of "increasing leisure" through the efficiency of robot tech and Halina's recent piece on how Zoomers are dropping alcohol for chemicals that can increase work efficiency. I suspect the people who will have the robots to do their housework will (because of costs) also be the ones who will use that time not for leisure but to do more work.
Rich people have always had household employees that did all the work. I am acquainted with a woman who has a full-time housekeeper six days a week, and then a different Monday housekeeper because God forbid one single day should pass without a full-time housekeeper.
Well, it’s hard to say. I don’t think she’s particularly unkind. She’s extremely confident that she has earned and is entitled to absolutely everything she has, although having parents who paid for elite prep school and then Harvard probably played a role, as did marrying a super wealthy guy. If she pays her employees decently and treats them well, I don’t know if she’s really unkind, particularly.
There's another aspect to the idea of the 15 hour work week which kind of ties into this: Keynes, Fuller, et al didn't take into consideration that technology is constantly evolving. We could have less work if we were happy with 1930s technology washing machines but if you want the 'next best thing' people have to be employed to invent, upgrade, and build new production lines. So you could have your 15 hour work week but you wouldn't have your house cleaning bots and you'd be Squeegeeing your wet laundry, lol. It would be like the Amish---arbritarily setting a certain level of technology and no further.
Soon AI could do the inventing for us. We'll be able to just float in a bag and exist in a virtual world while giant robot spiders care for our physical bodies.
IMO the biggest thing we need to do to improve the Latin America situation is pour lots of research money into finding an actual cure for addiction. Drug markets are demand- driven and attempts to throttle supply with more enforcement never actually solve the problem. Cartel violence is a cancer on the entire region. Our current methods for treating addiction don’t work at the scale we need.
An actual cure for addiction is the one thing I can think of that might actually solve the problem, or at least generate a meaningful improvement. Less demand for drugs would mean less revenue for cartels and fewer incentives to use violence to dominate the drug markets, in addition to the huge win for public health, American families, and social service budgets it would yield. It’s time for an Addiction Moonshot.
I am aware that such people exist, but evidence suggests that most drug sales are to heavy users who are addicted. A cure for addiction would not completely eliminate demand for drugs, but it would reduce it by a lot and make the overall problem much more tractable.
A big reason why we should prioritize truth over getting people to believe things on the belief that they'll act better is that one people find out that something that they were told is false, the person or group that told them the white lie will lose tons of credibility with the people, and will be vigorously distrusted from there on out.
Unless you’re Trump, in which case, when people find out you’ve been telling falsehoods about the 2020 election or Haitians eating pets or whatever, will just shrug and say “I don’t care, I still support him because he makes woke libs cry!”
Your point about the person not working being a 'loser' is spot on but I don't think you are taking that seriously enough (though it doesn't need to be call of duty there are other hobbies). That strongly suggests large fractions of our lives are basically being wasted peacocking. There is quickly diminishing returns to material goods (especially once you exclude purely positional goods which aren't increased when we all work more) yet it seems like we are all forced to scrabble to keep up with the Joneses so we can advertise our worth.
If that is really true it suggests even rather extreme public policies that deter working more than 20-30 hours a week might be huge utility wins.
And what is particularly scary about the current moment is that there is ever reason to fear we will figure out how to keep this up even when it offers almost zero benefit. Even if AI can make everything for us better and cheaper will we still need to spend 40 hours doing artisanal cheese making so we can buy artisanal wine and handmade sweaters and food rather than what the robots make for us just so we can advertise our romantic and social value? We seem to have a basically infinite ability to convince ourselves that we really value things for themselves when really it's only about status signalling.
The vision of a future where we have the means to live a life pursuing our own projects and dreams with copious lesiure but we instead live and struggle with the same stresses and unpleasantness is absolutely depressing.
In the "financially independent, retire early" (FIRE) communities you see constant new posts from people on the brink discussing "what do I tell people I do?"
While some of the angst is about being rich when your peers aren't that can't be the whole explanation. Small towns are full of small business owners who are rich when most of their peers aren't.
There is just something about "not being engaged in productive pursuits" that is really hard to adopt as a public persona. Even if not paid pursuits people gravitate towards rich person productive hobbies like board positions, charitable foundations, venture funds and angel investing, and so on.
Which study? This seems kind of obviously true? Like a $500 Michelin Star restaurant is probably not that much better than a nice local $50 restaurant, but the nice local $50 restaurant probably is a lot better than a $5 Taco Bell meal. Same with clothes, cars, most things…
I’ve been to plenty of Michelin Star restaurants and used that example because I just went to one recently that was quite disappointing for $700+ lol… I don’t think I’d be missing much if I could no longer afford that.
I wasn't basing that claim on a study of people but on the fact that national studies of happiness and satisfaction have shown basically no systematic GDP correlated increases for western democracies after they reach a certain point.
If what I said wasn't true something must be really going exceptionally badly pretty much in all western countries to explain why we aren't massively happier than we were in 1970.
I agree with this but there's a rational reason to make more money, which is as protection against costly risks, especially health risks. Saving for a rainy day basically.
But that is mostly going to be about having the same amount of savings as the rest of society. I mean the inflation adjusted GDP now is about twice what it was in the 1990s.
Why is it that we need so much more money now? I suspect a huge amount of this is explained by the fact you need to get enough money to retain your relative status. And I don't mean to say that is unreasonable. I sure as fuck don't want to end up in the old folks home that caters to the poor and destitute. Just like I don't want to live in a really poor neighborhood even if objectively their crime rates are less than what they were in nice places in the 90s.
But that is why it's a collective action problem. Individually it's completely rational to work hard but collectively it's a tragedy.
I agree that comparison is a huge amount of it (after all, Americans don't save very much).
But another reason why you might want to have more money now is because now we have targeted cancer drugs, and you want to be able to afford those if necessary. Or have the kind of expensive insurance that gives you maximum access to them.
Sure, but is what is important there the actual life extension or not feeling like you could have beaten cancer if only you had more money? I mean if we really cared a great deal about inventing new cancer drugs (not just affording those that exist) we could invest much more as a society to fund such research and we don't.
I mean this argument that these drugs make life overall better depends on the controversial assumption that it would be a much better world if we all had 200 year lifespans instead of 100 year lifespans. Is that true? I dunno, lots of people claim that it isn't .. I believe most people do in surveys.
I think this is a hard question and even though I do certainly lean to it being true I think it's probably less important in an absolute sense than it appears -- in other words we aren't as sad about the cancer drugs that don't exist but would have been invented by a richer nation all that much as you might expect.
I think a big question to ask about the work hours per week question is how many hours kids need to be in school. I've always got the feeling that the standard Slow Boring take is that they aren't in school *enough*. If so, then in a Keynesian utopia, that limits some of the leisure opportunities that active parents can do relative to the childless, and I'd curious what effects would come from that.
How much of school being too short is parental self interest though? I want school to go to 5:30 because I work until 5 so need my kids to be doing something in the afternoon. But if I also got off work at 2 I could spend the afternoon with my kids and it would be fine?
Before high-school, the educational part of school is probably over in 2 hours a day, or less. This is a lesson you learn very quickly if you home-school.
Parental self interest will always be the trump card in the end. What I'm curious is what is thought to be the minimum number of hours kids typically need to be in school in order to sufficiently learn what they need to learn.
Parents of school age children are a small special interest group with precipitous decline locked in. Like all municipal services, schools are mainly a negotiation between the empty-nester retiree homeowner supermajority that wants to minimize property taxes and the public employee unions that want to get paid as much as possible while minimizing working hours. I don’t think the interests of parents will be all that relevant politically.
I'd like to see some research done on the Mexican drug gang question too, because in my mind right now I can only see two possible answers, neither of them very satisfactory. With the presence of black markets, we'd either have to figure out some way to reduce demand (and I have no idea how that would work) or figure out some legal path of purchase and sale (which could have tradeoffs to endure).
There is a pretty decent Congressional Research Service backgrounder from 2022(?) on the Mexican drug cartels that gets into their history, operation, evolution and various efforts to combat them. Does not make one optimistic, but worth reading.
“I don’t want Democrats to be more enthusiastic about bombing in Iran” is almost a perfect summary of my frustration with Fetterman. I truly feel Manchin took too much shit for his stance but I feel like his brand of moderation was almost picture perfect considering the consituency of West Virginia but when it comes to Fetterman, his brand of moderation feels very misguided.
Like him being very enthusiastic about bombing Iran feels like an unwise moderation that bleeds support from base for almost nothing in exchange…
Why does no one think Fetterman's stroke affected him greatly? He seems like a different person now than he did pre-stroke. He really shouldn't be a senator.
I don't know, I feel like I see people talking about the stroke all the time.
It's true that strokes can cause personality change. The thing about Fetterman was that he had very shallow and superficial philosophical commitments pre-stroke. He had been "in politics" for a while, but as the mayor of a very small municipality. There's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash, and he got famous mainly for being an oddity (bald, 300 pounds) and a media star (went on Anthony Bourdain show) but his political views were pretty scattershot and random. Then he became lieutenant governor, which is a position where you famously don't have to do very much. That kind of blank, uncharacterizable profile appeals to Americans on many parts of the political spectrum, but especially the left, who interpreted a lot of thin, piecemeal evidence as proof that he was a socialist and "anti-establishment," almost like he was their noble savage. In fact, even pre-stroke, nobody really knew for sure where he'd land on a lot of issues once he was pressure-tested.
This is the kind of thing that for me gives Graham Platner the exact same vibes that Fetterman gave off four years ago. You could tell me virtually any story about what kinds of views Senator Platner will be espousing in 2030 and I'd believe it. He could be a communist, he could be an antivaxxer, he could go full white nationalist, he could try to mandate oysters in school lunches - nothing would surprise me.
Fetterman is still better in the Senate than Dr. Oz. Whether he runs again or should be primaried is another question.
If Platner is the best choice to beat Collins, he has my full support.
True, but is he better than Conor Lamb, who strikes me as a put-together normie Democrat? He still overperforms, and probably would've beat Dr Oz.
He's much better than Conor Lamb because he's the Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania and Lamb isn't. He beat Lamb in the primary, end of story.
Whether that should continue to be the case for the next election is a very different question. I'd be very happy with Lamb replacing him then.
John is trying to say “if we had known then what we know now, we would have voted for Lamb in the primary.” Hindsight, 20/20, etc.
I don’t think Fetterman should run again for health reasons.
If that opens the door to a better Democrat who has good prospects of winning, then I'm all for that
This is my issue with some people. Like I don't like or agree with Fetterman on some key issues, namely his stance on Iran or ICE. However I'd rather have someone I agree with 75% of the time and is a mostly reliable vote than someone who will give me 0% support and I can't even work with. That unfortunately is the state of governing with our 2 party system and unreasonable Republicans under Trump imo that my more progressive friends can't understand. They'd rather lose elections but be morally superior than have someone in office or a candidate they have to compromise on.
He votes nine times out of ten with Democrats but has some heterodox viewpoints for a D Senator that makes people think he shouldn’t be in the party.
That’s crazy. I’d rather have a mostly functioning Democrat than a republican any day of the week in that position.
Yes, we live in an atmosphere where voters relate to candidates whose politics mostly consist of scattershot bristling antagonism towards a bunch of things that piss them off too, but otherwise finding ways to come across as an outsider to politics. And the further from center you go, the more widespread the preference for this kind of character.
Obviously, Fetterman isn't Trump, but a lot of the same things were at work in getting these two into office, despite rather obvious limitations. And then, shock of all shocks, people like this turn out to actually be loose canons you can't depend on to think things through.
But with the print era pretty much over, I think they are harbingers of what majorities are likely to be electing. Reflective candidates who consider practical consequences, political and otherwise, come across as not just boring but actually the new image of corrupt. Inauthentic. I mean, I think Dems will learn their lesson regarding Fetterman, but not in general about candidates.
Absolutely agreed
Like I really feel bad for him but in retrospect I feel like it really was a big mistake not picking Conor Lamb…
AOC agrees - and apologized to Lamb for supporting Fetterman in the primary...
Fetterman isn’t moderating. He is poking his finger in the eye of Progs after Omnicausers repeatedly harassed him at his home (while giving Republicans a complete pass.)
Yeah, he's much closer to Sinema in primarily being motivated by personal grievances.
Yeah I almost wrote about Sinema too lmao
Like Manchin, with all his flaws, he was a partisan Dem who break with party for mostly unpopular stuffs at his home while Fetterman and Sinema, their passion project feels very misaligned
A big mistake is the belief that a 60 vote Democratic Senate has a bunch of additional north east/west coast style progressives. The reality is it has 8 or 10 Manchins who win in their state for parochial reasons, code conservative on a number of social issues, but will vote for Democratic judicial nominees and to expand/clean up holes in Medicaid.
I think many partisans hold an expectation is even more crazy than east coast or west coast progressive. At least the ones online… but I suspect this is an evaporative effect of people getting tired of outrage politics and opting out.
Right... 51 Manchins is better than 49 Warrens.
Another reason MY is so correct that both Presidentialism and the Senate itself were terrible missteps on the road to a functional democracy. We got only one-and-a-half out of three branches right...
This is probably true but there are plenty of Democratic senators from the upper Midwest (and Georgia, and the Southwest) who don’t come across like Manchin.
It’s a normal reaction to double down and get defensive. The level of delusional outrage over… thumbsing down Bernie’s $15 minimum wage rider that couldn’t be included in the budget reconciliation, just shows how far Prog extortion politics went. So excessive.
When my son hits his little sister for taking his Pokemon cards, that's a normal reaction but also I am clear that it's not acceptable. When a grown adult and US senator adopts that approach it's worse.
I am not saying it’s reasonable, just a common reaction. Fetterman’s conduct isn’t moderation. It’s spite.
Yeah, it gets unjustifiable when it aggravates people like me, who don't like Progs or Omnicausers and had nothing to do with them. If you're going to be spiteful, you've got to at least keep your spite narrowly tailored. Instead, the common and natural reaction for lots of relatively moderate Democrats is going to be to poke *their* fingers in *his* eye.
Yea like I def agree it is a normal reaction and I think it def was counterproductive for progressive to act that way but him doubling down and becoming defensive like making things worse imo
Like you don’t have to match the energy (and I’m not saying just caving to prog’s demand either btw - I think it is much smarter to pick fights. And this applies to both sides in this case
Lots of people are not super smart or healthy about these things. One aspect of the “Great Awokening” is how many normal people got pushed into crazy rabbit holes and contrarian opinions.
Lots of people aren’t senators!
Yeah I absolutely agree.
And now knowing a guy at phd who basically polarized against most obnoxious type of campus left and end up becoming basically “most off-putting campus activist with libertarian ideology”, this feels very relevant (I feel like, while I feel very bad for him to have such an experience, him becoming also obnoxious is not helping…)
It's perfectly reasonable to adopt a policy that if someone comes to my house and harasses my kids that I will do everything in my power to ruin whatever cause they stand for.
No, that's not reasonable, that's a version of honor culture or vigilantism.
In the words of Bernie Sanders to the nitwit who is replacing Kristi Noem, "You're a United States Senator, act like it."
If you want the privilege of being an elected official it comes with costs, part of them is people are allowed to harass you within the law, and the people who go beyond what's allowed get punished by the legal system, not by your personal revenge that also includes doing societal damage.
I can’t relate to how people who became a Senator—surely one of the 1000 most powerful people on the entire planet—still feel aggrieved. I really started having a low opinion of Fetterman after reading this interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/magazine/john-fetterman-interview.html
Fetterman: “I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me.”
Despite his last sentence you can just feel the disappointment. Seems like despite his image he was chasing glamor. And how are you so greedy that you are disappointed from being one of the most powerful people on the planet just because you still watch Netflix and eat salmon and ketchup??
It seems like he suffers from severe depression. That kind of focus on the negative and fatalistic thinking is a classic symptom. I know he’s had to seek inpatient treatment for it in the recent past.
Of course, maybe you shouldn’t be a US Senator if you have major mental health issues.
He’s also quite like Sinema in that his personal behavior is highly alarming. The recent story about Sinema playing homewrecker went way too under the radar and in retrospect, provides an easy answer for why she made zero effort to fight for her job.
Fetterman has largely been a disappointment. I would kind of be surprised if he ran for re-election in 2028 but I think he's a one and done.
Every time advocates for a political cause have to keep on expending energy complaining that people are avoiding the logical outcome because they are pissed at the advocates, the advocates really should look in a mirror and say "how can we be less annoying?"
See also: Georgists.
Progressives used to love Fetterman though. He was the progressive candidate when he ran. You can’t blame his changing on progressives when he was the one who changed first.
It was the shorts. They were deceptive.
Progs love the stabbed in the back narrative. They did the same crap with Sinema. They pulled the same stuff on Fetterman. Turing friends into enemies.
It's their fault he changed his positions after being elected on those positions?
No. It was projection. Kind of like how Bella has no personality in Twilight so that the readers can project whatever they want onto her.
I dunno, he seems just very supportive of Israel to me. That used to be pretty common for Democrats.
It’s not just that. Look how he’s voted on domestic legislation.
So is his motivation there poking fingers in the eyes of the Progs too?
I guess I'm skeptical of divining motivations. He's certainly on the right of the Democratic party, but I don't think we need to come up with complicated psychological reasons to explain it.
I wasn't trying to say anything about motivations. You said "he seems just very supportive of Israel to me" so I said, it's not just that.
Sorry, you're right. My original comment was to Dan Quail, who was speaking about motivations.
That was back when the big issue was the Arab states ganging up on Israel, and long before settlements and Israel’s MAGA turn.
I don't know why bombing Iran would be considered moderation at all - whether it's wise or unwise is a different matter.
I think fetterman is an enthusiastic about bombing iran. Because he genuinely believes it's the best course of action
He's also correct
"He's also correct"
Translation: You agree with him.
I disagree. Fetterman is a great example of the kind of moderation the Democratic Party needs.
Nah I disagree - Iike it’s not like all of his instincts are misaligned or wrong (like him calling for border security was a great call, defending ICE agent at the wake of first incident? Def not so much. And him going all in for Iran warfare, considering the war is already underwater is not a type of moderation we need imo.
Countries not understanding their near neighbours is a common problem. Britain similarly spends lots of its elites' time and energy on the Middle East, as well as following US politics and topics of global concern (eg climate change, development aid etc). But European affairs is so poorly regarded we essentially Brexited by accident, and then spent years in torturous negotiations with the EU because we don't understand how the EU functions or what parts of the relationship are valuable.
Similarly my understanding is that post-Soviet states were a low status desk for Russian diplomatic and intelligence officials prior to 2022, and this low investment contributed to poor quality information feeding up into the top of decision-making over the past decade or so.
My theory is that there's a combination of elites believing they understand nearby countries inherently without having to do much work or invest much in it, and them learning the language of their near neighbours doesn't provide the same payoffs as learning/speaking English or something more exotic. A world where more top British politicians spoke French and German, more top US politicians spoke Spanish, and more top Russian officials spoke Ukrainian and Kazakh is probably a better one.
Counterpoint, the Brits realize their true enemies are the the French.
That's always been the case.
"We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside”
-Sir Humphrey
I think foreign policy elites are just really bad at their jobs.
I think foreign policy elites believe their job is different from what normies think their job should be and so when normies get control in either country you have "unexpected" discontinuities.
Maybe part of this is that nearby nations are just boring. For example, Kipling wrote tons of poems about European stuff and no one reads them. His poems about the colonies are much more exciting.
Honestly, I think if Mexico became a little more boring that would be a win all around.
Well, Danegeld is still read, but that’s about the time back when Denmark was exciting.
Oh, his Epitaphs from the War are good (again, though, about an exciting topic) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war
Almost all post Soviet central Asians speak Russian along with their local language.
Конечно. But they are speaking it less and have been for some time. If you only engage in these countries as a monoglot Russian speaker, there's a whole bunch of pro Western and nationalist things that you cannot engage with or understand. It's similar to how there's only so much monoglot English speakers can understand even pro-Western countries like Mexico or Japan.
Part of it is post-imperialist. Russian elites think Central Asia is their playground and birthright. Similarly for Britain and Ireland. Somewhat similarly for the US and Mexico.
Only one of them is wrong :P
I think both Russia and Britain are wrong in this case.
Except the US has a lot of almost native Spanish speakers to draw from if needed.
And a lot of people make sure to keep them away from decision-making.
Like Marco Rubio.
There’s a much more specific case for the British. Ireland is right there and Britain occupies a quarter of the island.
I don't have any numbers here but my casual experience is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German so I'd expect this would apply to their top politicians.
We're of course worse for not speaking Spanish although that is changing.
Nick Clegg speaks French, Spanish and Dutch, to pick one example that I know.
A lot of the British upper class speak good French (partly because of the schools they go to, partly because they tend to ski in France or French-speaking Switzerland), so when the Tories are in power, the language skills tend to be better than when Labour are. German is probably number two, but a chunk less common. And there are quite a few who think they speak Greek but don't (they learned Ancient Greek and they've forgotten a lot more than they think they have).
The UK Foreign Office is dominated by foreign-service types and doesn't have a lots of monoglot desk-bound analysts the way the US State Department does, so language skills there are usually very good: the big problem is that while the Embassies in Europe are very high-prestige, the desks in King Charles Street are not (the Middle East and Asia desks are much bigger deals). Part of this is just that Paris Embassy is much easier to contact than the Baghdad Embassy, so UK-based decision makers tend to just call Paris rather than the France desk in KCS, while they'd talk to the Iraq desk in KCS in preference to calling Baghdad.
The UK foreign policy establishment outside the FO is a different story; there's the Europe lobby (Best for Britain, European Movement, etc) which is entirely separate from the FP establishment (Chatham House, etc).
“is that a fair chunk of English in general can speak French or German”
Maybe on a DC Comics alternate Earth. Their language ability is nowhere near continental abilities.
The best next change for American healthcare policy would be to get rid of employer-sponsored health insurance and make the entire country one giant insurance market, but no one is touching that with an 11-foot pole.
https://x.com/DolphinMossad/status/2029325120595001433
"I for one do *not* think things would be better if there were only one insurance company and RFK Jr was the CEO."
Relatedly, I've thought for several years that there is a tremendous irony that on a Venn diagram about 95% of the circle of people believing, "Gender affirming medicine should be completely exempt from government regulation," overlaps the circle of people believing, "The US government should provide universal health care."
Or abortion.
Very true! The political implications aren't nearly the same there though because an abortion is a "one-off" event, versus something that is theoretically a several decades' long course of treatments.
Maybe, but the idea that a Republican administration governing over a nationally-run healthcare system wouldn't zero out abortion seems unlikely to me. It's one thing for Trump to give the pro-life folks the back of the hand on forbidding abortion in blue states; it's another thing to actively support abortion.
Right, I'm not disputing that at all? The point is that the issue of changing federal funding and defunding for abortion between administrations is very different due to the fact that an abortion is a singular event -- you can't be continually having an abortion across multiple political cycles where you need to deal with changes in policy between administrations or changes in control of Congress. (Abortions are also not subject to the degrees of gradation that gender affirming care is.)
Yes, this is actually the best argument against the UK NHS. The subsidised-and-regulated mandatory insurance model (where, in many cases, the insurers are not allowed to be for-profit) that is common on the European continent is far more stable in the face of political risk.
At least in the UK there are non-NHS clinics.
Yes, the government is getting increasingly annoyed that stopping trans people from getting hormones through the NHS doesn’t actually stop them getting hormones.
And they can’t ban the hormones themselves, because they’re used by lots of cis people (e.g. oestrogen is in the contraceptive pill).
Typically built into the answer of "government runs the market" is "🙄🙄🙄 well OF COURSE the Republicans aren't running the government 🙄🙄🙄"
Market based insurance doesn't work. No other country does it.
Pick a system from of about 35 other rich countries and copy it.
I thought Switzerland did this?
They do, more or less. Of course it's heavily heavily regulated.
They do not.
Switzerland's insurance is split by the Canton. (So strike one on the countrywide marketplace for insurance idea)
Every resident of Switzerland is legally obligated to carry insurance. (Wait, this is not part of the nationalize insurance to solve everything plan?)
The cost of this insurance varies by the Canton of residence. So high cost Cantons like Zurich, Geneva, Basel, have monthly premiums that run around 500 CHF (643 USD) per month. + Or - 100 per month based on the deductible. Even the lower cost Cantons still run at 350 CHF. Cantons are tiny. Zurich is the biggest by population and it has only 700,000 people.
Now where is that premium cost coming from? The magic of the market in the capitalist banker's paradise of Switzerland?
No. They didn't get their money by being the kind of idiots who believe in a free market for health insurance.
Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.
Companies can offer supplemental insurance that covers beyond the basic insurance. Policy holders have to ask for this and pay extra for it. Companies can decide whether or not to cover a patient with supplemental insurance.
That is how the Swiss insurance system works and it has little relationship to a market based system beyond there being private companies who provide the coverage.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Sounds a lot like Obamacare. I agree with you general premise that health insurance outside the US is not solely regulated by free market principles, but neither is it in the U.S. Even non-Obamacare plans need to get permission from state regulators to raise premiums, and they still need to keep their medical loss ratios above the ACA floors.
My opinion: It's probably a mistake to place so much focus on the payer side of the equation. That's not to say there isn't some juice there, but most of it was squeezed by ACA. If we really want to bring down costs then we probably need to look where the majority of healthcare dollars are spent (Hospitals and Physician services). Unfortunately that means grappling with the reality that US doctors and nurses make significantly more money than their foreign contemporaries.
I never saw evidence that the ACA was modeled after Switzerland.* But the similarities were heavily discussed both at the time and during the "ramp up" after passage.
*I personally think Switzerland was a major model, but saying it was modeled after Romneycare made much more political sense.
That is the lower hanging fruit, but to take the idea of medical loss ratios.
Obamacare set the floor at 85%.
Medicaid and Medicare run at ~98%. Most other countries also run at ~>95%.
That 10% medical loss ratio is pure graft from the patient dollars to providers pipeline. They don't add anything that makes patients healthier or their care cheaper.
It's just that we here in America KNOW that private organizations are always more efficient than the government so we are happy to ignore the mountain of evidence which says, in health care, that they aren't.
I take your figures to be generally correct. I would add however that they probably only apply to Medicare part B in the US, and basic guaranteed plans in other countries. Most people covered by these plans also carry supplemental insurance (80% of Swiss citizens have supplemental health plans). I suspect when considered in total, the MLR would be somewhat lower. The MLR's for Medicare Advantage plans is around 90% and for Medicaid managed care plans (used by about 75% of recipients) the MLRs are around 91% (https://www.kff.org/medicare/health-insurer-financial-performance/#7f9ce44b-5b2b-4d3c-ba10-0aec57596a77).
I'm all for eliminating waste (graft??), but I think it would be optimistic to expect more than 5% savings from going after insurance admin bloat. 5% is nothing to sneeze at, but is it worth the political risk of completely transforming the US healthcare system? I'd also add that when all was said and done, the US would still have the worlds most expensive healthcare.
Hey see, we can agree sometimes!
Thanks for the information, but can I ask you to avoid calling anyone idiots, even hypothetical people?
“Instead, each Canton has their own insurance offerings from various national insurance companies. What those plans have to cover is mandated by law. Insurance companies cannot deny any patients from buying these plans. The price of those plans has to fall in a very narrow band that the cantonal government sets every year based on that company's previous year performance and the larger cantonal insurance market.”
Sounds nice, but you still have to contain costs or this will just lead to a run up in premiums or companies leaving the market like California and Florida have for homeowners.
The basket of things that have to be covered is set at the federal level. There is also a sort of support payment system from the government for those companies which happen to end up with the costliest patient pool.
Employer-provided insurance is market-based insurance.
Competition between insurance providers for the business of employers, or between employers over the generosity of employer self-insured plans, is the main market signal we have for what share of their income Americans want to spend on healthcare.
But it's a very imperfect, weak signal, because the actual consumers of healthcare only have indirect feedback, such as by complaining to their employer about the quality or cost of the insurance the employer has chosen to offer.
Unfortunately employer group plans where all the buying decisions are made by employers are the only real way in our current system that individuals can participate in buying groups that pool their bargaining power against insurance providers.
But we could create other types of patients buying groups, so that people could join an insurance buying group unrelated to their job, instead of negotiating on their own as an end individual with the insurance company.
It works very well in the US. The problem is the political obsession with the 5-10% of uninsured. A lot of problems with US healthcare are actually anti-market regulations.
5-10% uninsured in the US looks like 17 to 34 million people.
"Why are we obsessed with the entire population of Malaysia being uninsured? That's so foolish."
There are problems based on anti market regulations, but those aren't the main problems making our healthcare costly.
Those are the exact issues making US healthcare more expensive but making insurance companies the main villain works better politically than making doctors, regulators and other supply side parties the villains.
Oh our doctors are definitely a cartel.
They most definitely are.
Also, being uninsured is not the same as not having access to healthcare. It’s a very widespread lie.
Multiple Sclerosis drugs which you take for the rest of your normal length life, cost 68k to 120k in the United States. This doesn't even count MRI's and neurologists.
In your opinion does a person with MS but no insurance have "access to healthcare?"
Entire books have been written on how health insurance does not, in fact, work “very well” in the US unless you’re rich.
That doesn’t make it true. Lots of books have been written on trans ideology but that doesn’t make it a major issue in the US. A lot of people voted for Bernie who regularly lies about 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The quality of healthcare in the US is pretty good. The high cost is related to poor anti-market regulations and the fact that US is a rich country. Lots of the uninsured have opted out of the healthcare system because they’re healthy and it costs a lot. They can still go to the emergency room.
Just put newborns on Medicare and watch the old system slowly erode away.
Medicare is not free to recipients and has pretty high out of pocket unless you buy a supplement or Advantage from an insurance company.
I can understand getting rid of the tax benefit but getting rid of it would be illiberal.
“ if you met a childless person who earned a high wage but only worked 20 hours a week because he didn’t value money very much and just wanted to focus on Call of Duty”
I feel seen.
“ There is simply no major mass-transit system in the world that works on the basis of free buses.”
Luxembourg actually. I’m here right now.
Luxembourgish transit is not major in any sense.
Luxembourgeoise was right there...
so the debate trick would have been to ask you for a list of cities that just qualify as "major" and then find the one that has lower daily ridership than Luxembourg.
Services 700,000 residents plus another 100,000 business travelers and tourists.
I'm curious why you're so adamant that something that would be the #79 metro area in the US -- if you throw in tourists -- just beating out Colorado Springs and Little Rock, Arkansas, counts as "major".
And without tourists it would be #88 just beating Ogden, Utah, and Wichita, Kansas.
Same metro system as Seattle. Which ranks as between 7th and 10th in the U.S. depending on the source.
Seattle's buses don't stop at the city limits so Seattle's size isn't the right metric. King County Metro is Seattle's primary public transit system and services 38 cities in addition to Seattle.
The size of the MSA is still imperfect but closer to the true measure of the size of serviced population.
That’s the point. Luxembourg has the same daily ridership as Seattle. It would literally be.a top 10 system in the U.S. that makes a case for “major” you are proving my point
I meant 100,000 visitors on a given day. Last year Luxembourg had over 3 million overnight visitors. All of whom presumably used its mass transit (even the airport train is free.)
I’d seriously consider taking a job that paid me half as much as I make now but only required 20 hours a week to work, if it could offer the same level of benefits. I’d have to move to a less nice apartment but the lifestyle benefits seem nice. The issue is few such jobs exist, and even when they do they rarely offer health insurance or PTO.
To be fair, your take-home pay would be less than half your current amount because your benefits would mostly need to remain at the same level. I see this as a nine-month-salary professor, for example. My summer paychecks, which come from my research grants, are noticeably larger than the rest of the year.
what happens when you work for yourself is that (depending on the field and market etc.) you can vary greatly on how busy you are...with 100 hour work weeks and 10 hour work weeks.
That’s the dream. It seems like it takes a lot of hustle in the early years to get a business off the ground the though, before you can take advantage of that flexibility.
Why would you need PTO with a 20hr a week job?
My assumption is the particular 20 hours per week I work would still be pretty fixed and not flexible, so it would be something five 4 hour days a week. So if I got sick, I would need to take time off. Since I’d be making less money, taking unpaid time off for sickness would be even less tolerable.
Also, I’d like to still be able to take real vacations occasionally where I get to disconnect from work completely. Even if I was working three 6.5 hour days per week and had four-day weekends, that’s not enough time to travel to Europe, for example.
Ah I was thinking more along the lines of needing to bill 20 hours a week and there be flexibility around those hours. Or, take a week off and work 40 hours the following week.
The key to doing this, and it can be done, is to have it seemly for the client. You make it work and if that means you have to get up early at the hotel in Paris and work 4 hours, you do it.
Sick leave and vacation are both reasons to want PTO.
Work 10 hours Monday and Tuesday and then take a week off and then work Thursday and Friday of the following week.
That would depend on one being able to shift one's hours around. Also, it doesn't solve the sick leave issue, since one can get sick at unpredictable times.
Remember that at least one of the reasons for paid sick leave is to discourage people from working while they have a disease that can infect other workers or customers.
To go on vacations
So it can work in a city state with the highest GDP per capita in the world.
Oh I certainly wouldn't try to conclude that free buses are a good idea anywhere else.
Now in terms of defining "major", Luxembourg's daily ridership (about 350,000 a day) is equivalent to Seattle and and more than say Denver or Portland.
Luxembourg does not have free buses and paid-for non-buses, which is the proposed model for NYC. It has free everything.
Alon Levy's point (which Matt linked) that the important thing is for buses and subways to be the same fare so you don't get people switching between the two for financial reasons is a very strong one. If there's a bunch of money to spend on lowering fares in NYC, the best thing that the MTA could do with that money would be to lower MetroNorth and LIRR fares to be the same as subway/bus fares within the Five Boroughs.
Proposing free subways in NYC is so obviously unaffordable that no-one dares mention it and it will clearly never happen; there are a handful who think free buses will be a first step to free subways, and a bigger group who claim to believe that, but they mostly know it won't happen and some rather like the idea of segregating the scary poors on the buses so the subways (which they use) can be kept for people like them.
I've yet to talk to one person who has a real, workable idea about how to pay for that proposal as well that doesn't include raising taxes on everyone, or just their specific set of rich people that they don't like.
I’m the guy who, every time this idea is raised in a Philly-related subreddit, has to point out that increasing bus frequency and reliability such that a poor commuter only needs an emergency Uber once every 2 months instead of once every two weeks will save said person far more money annually.
If we had $200M a year of funding to replace our farebox recovery, that should be the absolute fucking last thing SEPTA does with it.
> I feel seen
I support you, man. Live the dream!
I read this and assumed Matt doesn’t spend much time in San Diego
I'm with MY on [not] bombing Iran, and maybe it is generational. Over the last 8 or 10 years I've come to realize how much my alignment with the Democrats is really born of things that were happening during the Bush 2 administration. The party and broader left was a much more hospitable place in those days for socially libertarian dudes who also thought American society could be improved with a more coherent, social democracy-lite version of the federal government. I still think it's the correct way to do things on the merits but the older I get the more homeless it feels.
I think any younger people who are expecting something better to come out of the Iran situation probably would be well served to read up on experience with Iraq in the 90s. We had regular air strikes and missile attacks for years and it never achieved anything. A lot of the rationale for the eventual invasion was that the kind of war we are currently seeing against Iran is unlikely to succeed (going in on the ground is of course even worse).
It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
The conundrum of the Iranian campaign comes from the conflicting forces:
-- The administration believes that continued air attacks extended over time will increase the pressure on the regime and lead to its downfall
-- The Air Force/Navy's attack plan presumably goes after the highest priority targets first and the longer the campaign goes on the lower the value of targets that can be hit.
This is why air campaigns are a poor bet to lead to regime change. You really need massive ground forces that go in there and complete the job.
> This is why air campaigns are a poor bet to lead to regime change. You really need massive ground forces that go in there and complete the job.
100% agreed on all your points, regarding this point. I just wanted to add how tough that would be for a country as large as Iran with 92M people as well. There is no way that would go over well.
I wonder how much of this is just social media making “normie” views more accessible. Like when the Internet first came out, civil libertarians were the first adopters and it seemed like EFF-type views were widely held, but I’m not sure that ever actually impacted Democratic politics. Maybe those views never had any real influence and it’s just more obvious now that everyone is online.
I think it's mainly just that people aren't very principled.
>It's always worth remembering that the most successful 20th century military actions by the US met the following requirements: (i) authorized by Congress, (ii) public support by the American people, and (iii) strong international backing. All 3 isn't a guarantee of success either but it has never worked without all of them in place.
I can think of at least one major exception to this rule. Our intervention in Grenada lacked international backing (I believe even Thatcher opposed it) and congressional approval but Operation Urgent Fury was a major success. The differences between Iran and Grenada are too obvious to be worth mentioning, just pointing out that foreign policy rarely comes with clear rules for success.
The lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan is "don't commit thousands of troops to a decade(s)-long invasion and rebuild", not "don't bomb people far away". I'm surprised how Matt and many others keep missing that. I expect that if Trump sends troops into Iran, his approval will completely crater up to and including potential impeachment.
I don't understand the response. It isn't about bombing people far away it's about goals and achieving outcomes.
Sorry, I just realized you said Iraq in the 90s, not the 00s. I see where you're coming from now. To that point, I would offer (1) it did achieve goals like getting Iraq out of Kuwait, (2) Saddam wasn't removed, and (3) it was over 30 years ago and the situations are only superficially comparable. I'm not trying to offer a strong justification for the current action but rather just say that it's also not clearly unwarranted either.
I think one could really dig into the weeds and come up with a case (not that the Trump admin is doing that).
I just also think it's fair to say that after having these kinds of engagements in the region for the better part of 40 years the burden of proof is pretty firmly on anyone who thinks it's going to be different this time.
Yes, but this time the Israelis are involved, so they likely know something. They seem much better at planning Middle East escapades than the US at this point. I doubt even the MAGAs are dumb enough to trip into some sort of Iraq quagmire.
Israel is good at quick short term tactical successes, in part due to its military prowess but in part due to its willingness to take a 'let God sort em out' approach to these fights, then leave all of the long term messes and fallout to other people (mostly America). Their involvement makes this worse, not better.
I agree that the chances of a quagmire remain low largely because there was 0 attempt to make the case for this to the American public and there is no popular support for a real invasion. But we should not be blind to the way one escalation and counter escalation tends to justify the next. Once shots are being fired it is always easier to justify doubling down than pulling back.
An Iran that can't feed its people, cascades into years of civil war with refugee flows that impoverish its neighbors, and makes everybody mad at the US, may not be Israel's goal, but it's not not their goal.
The short term tactical successes are the visible tip on an iceberg of years long intelligence and operational planning and execution. See: pagers.
Sure it was very impressive. And here they are. Barely 18 months later. Still fighting Hezbollah.
Fixing Arab societies is probably beyond their abilities.
Plenty of Arab societies that haven’t been attacked by Israel are doing fine.
But see also 10/7. Their record in the last few years remains mixed.
Israel does plan better. But they can have a goal that is just "Leave Iran a bombed out husk unable to project power." and call it a day. That is a win they can sell to their people.
That goal is profoundly unsatisfying to Americans and not seen as worth it.
We also have to think about the world in a much broader, longer term way than Israel.
Yeah, I frankly look at what happened in Syria with the refugee crisis and figure this would be 10x worse, and I don't think its worth it. Plus it seems like Bibi is foaming at the mouth to make every city in Iran a cinderblock and I think that is pretty terrible and creating a whole new generation of potential terrorists doesn't seem great to me...
An Iran unable to project power would be better than the status quo antebellum. A friendlier Iran would a new government would be best, however. I think that's true for both the US and Israel.
what do you consider those most successful military actions?
Almost half the mailbag devoted to just one question is kind of impressive. I wish I could get a question like that in! Wrt the actual answer, I think one doesn't have to go full Graeber to recognize that a great deal of time-on-the-clock is not really "job", it's work to enable the Real Work(tm) to get done. Meetings and paperwork (sadly still in abundance working grocery, it's farcical), filing interdepartmental memos up and down the chains of command, servicing customers. Not that that latter's not a real function of the job, to be sure, but there's a very real sense in which having a friendly meandering conversation with the kindly grandmother at checkout funges against filling empty shelves. You can intentionally overstaff to provide such slack...but then we're moving away from the 15 hour week by encouraging more "consumption".
There are also hard physical limits to ekeing out efficiencies when demand is inconsistent. Like, yeah, as a popular grocery store we know which days we'll probably need to schedule more staff. (I don't understand why everyone and their mother shops on Sundays?) But to actually get that down to an hour-by-hour estimate...I mean it's doable in theory, but no one wants to work "weird" hours like 7 to 2, or show up just to bag for a couple hours due to surge demand, or whatever. And if you're wrong, then you end up with a few unfortunate souls on the sales floor dealing with constant customer queries, lines stretching into the aisles, and the truck driver's tapping his watch thinking to himself, ugh, I gotta drive back to Central Warehousing and these jabronis are making me wait cause there's no one qualified to use the forklift. Not great, Bob!
Finding meaning outside of work is a whole other thing though. People tend to just handwave it away as "leisure", and of course I'd love to have more time on the margin to kick back and listen to Boris albums on repeat or whatever. Only so much ass-sitting before restlessness kicks in though. There is so much work to get done in the world, whether we officially call it "work" or not, and sooner or later I feel called back to the fight. None of us are free from toil until everyone is free from toil.
What full on radicalized me against corporate America was when Walgreens started doing just-in-time scheduling for pharmacy technicians and forcing us to send techs, most of whom needed the hours, home early on days when they were scheduled if the computers thought we weren’t doing enough business to warrant them. Of course those lull times were the only times a lot of maintenance and housekeeping type tasks could be accomplished in the chronically understaffed stores.
JIT scheduling is evil. I’m glad that where I work now doesn’t do that.
A lot of healthcare requires having some sort of labor slack because of the harms associated with not providing reliable services. If you work at a trauma center, you need (and are paid to have) a team available to take care of an emergency surgery with zero notice. But those workers aren't generally just twiddling their thumbs. They're usually doing other tasks that are important but can be temporarily deferred (coordination/scheduling stuff, for example).
We all know examples of "fraud, waste, abuse" and have examples of what we'd consider low-yield resource usage. But even private equity firms have realized that it's pretty hard to trim things without significant degradation of service quality (and sometimes just end up closing a facility instead).
Thankfully where I work now and where my husband works as a nurse are unionized healthcare operations that don’t do nearly as much of this stuff
I've worked at union and non-union places. The c suite is always trying something. The main difference is that in union places we see strikes, in non-union places they face crushing labor shortages (because people will switch jobs). Economics always wins.
I have yet to see a strike, though I know they’ve voted on it before (and turned it down) at my husband’s job
Yeah, we're straight up not allowed to do that...clocking out early is voluntary. Might still get an "attendance point" docked, but every once in awhile Dancing With The Stars align and we get done with half an hour or more to spare before official close. So then the question is asked, do you wanna stay and do housekeeping stuff like peeling discarded produce stickers off the floor, or do you wanna forfeit a bit of pay to go home sooner? "Fortunately" there's always infinity delayed maintenance to take care of at a grocery store, so there's work if one wants it...it just might not be pretty or fun. We too have that metric, uh..."sales per employee hour" or whatever, and it's remarkably hard to get that number down. Sometimes I honestly suspect we do the airline booking thing and intentionally over-schedule with the expectation that X number of staff are gonna call out/be late/leave early. Very rare that no one does. I've come to appreciate the role of middle management more as well, since they really are a limiting factor on production...even at a grocery store, there are simply too many responsibilities that must (policy- or legally-wise) be done by a manager only. So you don't ever mess with their hours or things go organic pear-shaped really quick.
Covid was a really weird ad absurdum in this regard, since customers would descend like locusts to buy all the things, and then you had all this dead time with nothing much to do cause store was literally cleaned out. But you can't send people home yet, cause as soon as the delivery truck arrives it's all hands on deck to restock the entire place. So then we'd, like, bust out the power washer to deep clean the produce fridge, or scrub graffiti out of the bathrooms, or whatever. This was also the only time period when they lifted the cap on OT, which is otherwise strictly controlled. That's the flip side of JIT scheduling, if you don't let people do occasional OT when it's warranted, then you aren't *really* covering all the in-time and work gets pushed off to the future anyway.
I mean, grocery stores usually have tons of employees so someone will always call out
There should be a whole class in pharmacy school entitled “how to gracefully and quickly end phone calls from old ladies”
I nominate my mom as the final exam.
In Switzerland and Germany, supermarkets are closed on Sundays.
So . . . the big surge avalanche is referring to comes from Swiss and Germans flying to the US to get their Sunday grocery shopping in?
Never thought I'd see a Boris shout out on SB! Awesome band, incredible live show.
Blame Freddie. For everything he's wrong and rude about, the man has impeccable taste in music, and I'd much prefer his playlist to Matt's. (Will find it highly amusing if FdB also ages into "eh, my son likes pop music, I guess it's not so bad after all".)
I'd love to see them live if I had the hearing capacity to spare, hah. Slowly getting tinnitus over time from work has made me a lot more cautious in how loud I blast my beats, and I am told they're probably the 2nd loudest band in the world. It's disturbing to actually miss conversations sometimes because a critical mass of phonemes gets dropped. Too youngish for that!
I think Slow Boring precisely shows that jobs are less lumpy. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters, if they are all half price and half as often I think that would be straightforwardly better for me. And also "writer who produces a couple columns a week in conjunction with several others" is the most successful model in journalism -- that's the NYT op ed page, for example.
Most jobs do not have to be lumpy though—people could work European hours and vacation norms and things would still run. Most people would be a lot happier working less and retiring later over our current system where you burn yourself out while working dreaming of retiring early (sometimes extremely early like the FIRE folks) then are retired with nothing to do.
It's a prisoner's dilemma microeconomics problem.
I need to be working at least as hard as my peers or I risk losing this job. If that happened I would lose my healthcare and potentially have my resume scarred in a way that moves me down the ladder. That would be bad, so I work hard to avoid it. Most people do - and thus none of us get to work less.
Unfortunately the prisoner’s dilemma extends across countries too. For a while, it was the US defecting at Europe’s expense. Now China’s defecting even harder at the US’s (and Europe’s) expense.
We still live in a world where employees working harder is a competitive advantage.
I am at a global company and whenever I think about placing a role in the EU, their labor laws nudge me to place it in India or the US instead...
You also have to, most regrettably, also have to compete for scarce essentials like housing in the NIMBY era.
Yes, this is where some policy intervention comes in to nudge things in the direction of allowing for leisure. Lower hour work week before overtime kicks in, revisit rules on exempt/non-exempt status.
Something like a sabbatical fund if one has worked 56 of the last 60 quarters for time off/retraining. (Spitballing)
I think Matt's cultural frame is important as well, like parental leave is now seen as much more valid than it used be.
I understand the sentiment, but when the motive is competition with your peers, I have doubts about how effective interventions can be.
Like literally this weekend, no one is FORCING me to work but I probably will. Same for my wife. That's just how better paying white-collar jobs are these days. There's no overtime or anything, just cultural expectations and not wanting to fall behind my peers.
I hear people say things like this a lot, but it’s not inevitable. Most of my friends are upper middle class white collar workers, and I can only think of two who are routinely working more than 40-45 hours per week. You do probably have to accept being more like 80th percentile in income rather than 95th, but it’s accessible if you prioritize it.
I feel this. My company has 'unlimited' PTO and the result is that I am never off even when I am off. Though I also don't really get too mad about it as long as I'm treated like an adult/trusted to get my stuff done without micromanagement. There's a point where it comes with the territory.
I used to think I needed to work weekends. Then I became more senior and stopped doing it.
wait, are you saying that working weekends paid off...?
No, not really. I just realized I didn't need to do it. If I went back in time and skipped that weekend-work, with a few specific exceptions were something was on fire, I'd be in the same place economically today.
I don't know your or your wife's situation, so this isn't a comment on your situation.
But, the indications are pretty clearly that a lot of knowledge worker time isn't all that well spent in the office or on the clock. Meetings come up as being big time sucks with limited productivity.
For me, my most stressed and time crunched work environment was one with long unnecessary meetings with too many people at each one. Basically pushed a bunch of my real work after hours and weekends, it was a huge problem.
I don't disagree... The days fill up with dubious meetings - but I can't skip those, right? So then I end up doing real thinking on the weekend.
If your point is "this could all be so much more efficient", sure I totally agree! But it ISN'T, so this is what happens.
TBH my kids feel the same way about school. This is just how the world works.
"revisit rules on exempt/non-exempt status"
Totally valid. The rule should be something like 'accept a job knowing it's exempt' means the job is, in fact, exempt.
There's also the inefficiencies of part-time work.
If a doctor takes 3 hours to do a surgery, she can work 18 hour weeks doing 6 a week, or 60 hour weeks doing 20 a week.
Say you become an expert at the surgery after doing 2000 of them. The second doctor will hit that in 2 years, and then do 1000 expert surgeries per year.
The first will take almost 6.5 years to hit that level.
And this ignores the years of education we require of doctors.
I mean, that’s why surgical fellowships are usually 6-7 years long and they work those 60 hour weeks.
When I owned that restaurant fire protection business the entire business was built off # of inspections performed per day per technician. It was ~ all variable but our techs mostly worked 40 hour weeks. Some wanted weekend overtime work. They could have worked fewer hours and earned less but they didn’t. My sense is most people wouldn’t actually be a lot happier working less **and** earning less. Which is the tradeoff vs. Europe.
This is why people are so outraged when back to office mandates kick in - for several years, the desktop PC class found the cheat codes to working less while making the same money, and losing that flex feels like a true net loss.
I would agree, although I would say "working less while equally productive, and making the same money."
I suspect it would be hard on small business. Just going off of where I grew up, there are lots of 2-4 person businesses where it’s a hardship when someone takes vacation. 4 weeks or so would make it even tougher.
Not a reason not to do it, but we should understand where blowback might come from.
There are lots of jobs that work with European hours but it is the case that for high productivity jobs there are increasing returns to productivity to investing more time (until you reach burnout in which case productivity falls dramatically off a cliff). A project with ten engineers will not go twice as fast as project with 5 engineers (in fact it might go slower) and 9 moms will not produce a baby in a month. By dint of practice a lawyer or surgeon who takes on extra cases will become better on average compared to the one who takes extra vacations.
What a treat to drink my coffee perusing the mail bag and see a question from my son about an 18th century Dutch essay I have never heard of be answered. Thanks Slow Boring — it’s hard when your kids grow up and move away but you are connecting us in unexpected ways.
"Something I noticed while going over these questions, though, is that while I think Slow Boring readers mostly agree with me about most stuff (that’s not so surprising), one of the exceptions is that the commenters seem to be significantly more hawkish than I am."
I think you should have polls on this. I suspect that people who are animated by the Gaza debate are more likely to comment on this. There may be a silent majority that doesn't care enough to comment.
It's like bad reviews.
People are just WAY more likely to leave a review when they had a bad experience.
People who are animated about some issue in politics are not necessarily those who’re affected by it.
I actually think there's a certain groundedness to be gained from doing at least some household work. To be sure, I'm not about to throw away my washing machine, but I also think doing the dishes and cleaning up clutter around the house does give me some kind of buy in to the communal space of the home, facilitating co- ownership of the space. I think having robots do all that work actually could take something away that helps keeps us human.
It's interesting to contrast MattY's view here toward the benefits of "increasing leisure" through the efficiency of robot tech and Halina's recent piece on how Zoomers are dropping alcohol for chemicals that can increase work efficiency. I suspect the people who will have the robots to do their housework will (because of costs) also be the ones who will use that time not for leisure but to do more work.
Rich people have always had household employees that did all the work. I am acquainted with a woman who has a full-time housekeeper six days a week, and then a different Monday housekeeper because God forbid one single day should pass without a full-time housekeeper.
I don't think it makes her less human.
Yeah I knew a SAHM that also had a live-in nanny, but she was married to a C-suite exec and had 7 kids, I’m sure she needed the help
Less human no. Perhaps less kind.
Well, it’s hard to say. I don’t think she’s particularly unkind. She’s extremely confident that she has earned and is entitled to absolutely everything she has, although having parents who paid for elite prep school and then Harvard probably played a role, as did marrying a super wealthy guy. If she pays her employees decently and treats them well, I don’t know if she’s really unkind, particularly.
Yes, hence the perhaps.
There's another aspect to the idea of the 15 hour work week which kind of ties into this: Keynes, Fuller, et al didn't take into consideration that technology is constantly evolving. We could have less work if we were happy with 1930s technology washing machines but if you want the 'next best thing' people have to be employed to invent, upgrade, and build new production lines. So you could have your 15 hour work week but you wouldn't have your house cleaning bots and you'd be Squeegeeing your wet laundry, lol. It would be like the Amish---arbritarily setting a certain level of technology and no further.
Had we ended at air conditioning this would have been ideal
Soon AI could do the inventing for us. We'll be able to just float in a bag and exist in a virtual world while giant robot spiders care for our physical bodies.
I would definitely describe the "Wall-E" style of existence to be less human.
As someone that lives by myself, my buy-in is my mortgage and I want a robot to do all of the labor
IMO the biggest thing we need to do to improve the Latin America situation is pour lots of research money into finding an actual cure for addiction. Drug markets are demand- driven and attempts to throttle supply with more enforcement never actually solve the problem. Cartel violence is a cancer on the entire region. Our current methods for treating addiction don’t work at the scale we need.
An actual cure for addiction is the one thing I can think of that might actually solve the problem, or at least generate a meaningful improvement. Less demand for drugs would mean less revenue for cartels and fewer incentives to use violence to dominate the drug markets, in addition to the huge win for public health, American families, and social service budgets it would yield. It’s time for an Addiction Moonshot.
Most of the people doing drugs aren't addicted to them. They are doing drugs because drugs are REALLY fun.
I am aware that such people exist, but evidence suggests that most drug sales are to heavy users who are addicted. A cure for addiction would not completely eliminate demand for drugs, but it would reduce it by a lot and make the overall problem much more tractable.
A big reason why we should prioritize truth over getting people to believe things on the belief that they'll act better is that one people find out that something that they were told is false, the person or group that told them the white lie will lose tons of credibility with the people, and will be vigorously distrusted from there on out.
Unless you’re Trump, in which case, when people find out you’ve been telling falsehoods about the 2020 election or Haitians eating pets or whatever, will just shrug and say “I don’t care, I still support him because he makes woke libs cry!”
Your point about the person not working being a 'loser' is spot on but I don't think you are taking that seriously enough (though it doesn't need to be call of duty there are other hobbies). That strongly suggests large fractions of our lives are basically being wasted peacocking. There is quickly diminishing returns to material goods (especially once you exclude purely positional goods which aren't increased when we all work more) yet it seems like we are all forced to scrabble to keep up with the Joneses so we can advertise our worth.
If that is really true it suggests even rather extreme public policies that deter working more than 20-30 hours a week might be huge utility wins.
And what is particularly scary about the current moment is that there is ever reason to fear we will figure out how to keep this up even when it offers almost zero benefit. Even if AI can make everything for us better and cheaper will we still need to spend 40 hours doing artisanal cheese making so we can buy artisanal wine and handmade sweaters and food rather than what the robots make for us just so we can advertise our romantic and social value? We seem to have a basically infinite ability to convince ourselves that we really value things for themselves when really it's only about status signalling.
The vision of a future where we have the means to live a life pursuing our own projects and dreams with copious lesiure but we instead live and struggle with the same stresses and unpleasantness is absolutely depressing.
In the "financially independent, retire early" (FIRE) communities you see constant new posts from people on the brink discussing "what do I tell people I do?"
While some of the angst is about being rich when your peers aren't that can't be the whole explanation. Small towns are full of small business owners who are rich when most of their peers aren't.
There is just something about "not being engaged in productive pursuits" that is really hard to adopt as a public persona. Even if not paid pursuits people gravitate towards rich person productive hobbies like board positions, charitable foundations, venture funds and angel investing, and so on.
"There is quickly diminishing returns to material goods"
Hasn't that study been disproven?
Which study? This seems kind of obviously true? Like a $500 Michelin Star restaurant is probably not that much better than a nice local $50 restaurant, but the nice local $50 restaurant probably is a lot better than a $5 Taco Bell meal. Same with clothes, cars, most things…
" Like a $500 Michelin Star restaurant is probably not that much better than a nice local $50 restaurant, "
That makes it sound you like you don't have a lot of experience. Same with clothes and cars.
Like we can road trip in a $25k corolla and a $60k Lexus and a $120k Mercedes and a $400k Rolls and you'd be like...Oh, they are a lot nicer.
I’ve been to plenty of Michelin Star restaurants and used that example because I just went to one recently that was quite disappointing for $700+ lol… I don’t think I’d be missing much if I could no longer afford that.
Veblen Goods.
I wasn't basing that claim on a study of people but on the fact that national studies of happiness and satisfaction have shown basically no systematic GDP correlated increases for western democracies after they reach a certain point.
If what I said wasn't true something must be really going exceptionally badly pretty much in all western countries to explain why we aren't massively happier than we were in 1970.
I agree with this but there's a rational reason to make more money, which is as protection against costly risks, especially health risks. Saving for a rainy day basically.
But that is mostly going to be about having the same amount of savings as the rest of society. I mean the inflation adjusted GDP now is about twice what it was in the 1990s.
Why is it that we need so much more money now? I suspect a huge amount of this is explained by the fact you need to get enough money to retain your relative status. And I don't mean to say that is unreasonable. I sure as fuck don't want to end up in the old folks home that caters to the poor and destitute. Just like I don't want to live in a really poor neighborhood even if objectively their crime rates are less than what they were in nice places in the 90s.
But that is why it's a collective action problem. Individually it's completely rational to work hard but collectively it's a tragedy.
I agree that comparison is a huge amount of it (after all, Americans don't save very much).
But another reason why you might want to have more money now is because now we have targeted cancer drugs, and you want to be able to afford those if necessary. Or have the kind of expensive insurance that gives you maximum access to them.
Sure, but is what is important there the actual life extension or not feeling like you could have beaten cancer if only you had more money? I mean if we really cared a great deal about inventing new cancer drugs (not just affording those that exist) we could invest much more as a society to fund such research and we don't.
I mean this argument that these drugs make life overall better depends on the controversial assumption that it would be a much better world if we all had 200 year lifespans instead of 100 year lifespans. Is that true? I dunno, lots of people claim that it isn't .. I believe most people do in surveys.
I think this is a hard question and even though I do certainly lean to it being true I think it's probably less important in an absolute sense than it appears -- in other words we aren't as sad about the cancer drugs that don't exist but would have been invented by a richer nation all that much as you might expect.
I think a big question to ask about the work hours per week question is how many hours kids need to be in school. I've always got the feeling that the standard Slow Boring take is that they aren't in school *enough*. If so, then in a Keynesian utopia, that limits some of the leisure opportunities that active parents can do relative to the childless, and I'd curious what effects would come from that.
How much of school being too short is parental self interest though? I want school to go to 5:30 because I work until 5 so need my kids to be doing something in the afternoon. But if I also got off work at 2 I could spend the afternoon with my kids and it would be fine?
Before high-school, the educational part of school is probably over in 2 hours a day, or less. This is a lesson you learn very quickly if you home-school.
Parental self interest will always be the trump card in the end. What I'm curious is what is thought to be the minimum number of hours kids typically need to be in school in order to sufficiently learn what they need to learn.
Parents of school age children are a small special interest group with precipitous decline locked in. Like all municipal services, schools are mainly a negotiation between the empty-nester retiree homeowner supermajority that wants to minimize property taxes and the public employee unions that want to get paid as much as possible while minimizing working hours. I don’t think the interests of parents will be all that relevant politically.
Only about 20% of kids have decent enough parents that they shouldn’t be at boarding school full time anyway, most parents are a bad influence
Also how you count unpaid work matters a lot.
The paid work hours of an average UMC household have roughly doubled since Keynes time.
I'd like to see some research done on the Mexican drug gang question too, because in my mind right now I can only see two possible answers, neither of them very satisfactory. With the presence of black markets, we'd either have to figure out some way to reduce demand (and I have no idea how that would work) or figure out some legal path of purchase and sale (which could have tradeoffs to endure).
There is a pretty decent Congressional Research Service backgrounder from 2022(?) on the Mexican drug cartels that gets into their history, operation, evolution and various efforts to combat them. Does not make one optimistic, but worth reading.
China (and Singapore ) cuts demand by having draconian punishment for dealers and users, relative to here.