"...life just is the way it is and has the meaning (or lack thereof) that it has. So there’s nothing to be sad about."
Emo Matt:
“it’s good for human beings to exist and flourish.”
I suspect your real position is that the goodness of human flourishing is a basic source of value and meaning for human lives: human life is not meaningless, but instead meaningful in itself, not in virtue of depending on some larger (eg theological) structure of meaning.
Meaning is like value in this respect: when we say that human flourishing is valuable in itself, not because it contributes to the socialist revolution or the GDP, we are saying that it really is valuable, even though it does not depend for that value on some larger structure of value. It's non-derivatively valuable, and non-derivatively meaningful.
This might sadden people who wanted human value to be grounded in a grander story about our central place in divine creation (eg) or our leadership in the future intergalactic federation. To them you say: no need to look for a meaning external to human flourishing, when that itself is the source of meaning. No reason to be sad about the lack of an external grounding: it's meaningful in itself.
There is still plenty to be sad about on other grounds, mostly the gap between how few human lives go well and how many human lives could go well if we did all of this stuff (govt, economy, society, etc) a bit better. But responding to that gap with hope and motivation is better than responding to it with (mere) sadness.
I love Matt, but geez, the American analytic tradition is so bankrupt. There’s no moral trade off worth mentioning in killing off mosquitoes? No one is going to read the American tradition after the end of our empire. It has less salvageable material than the famously inscrutable debates of the Scholastics.
It doesn't even have to be a moral tradeoff - from my understanding mosquitos fill a population control niche in ecology. Destroy all the mosquitos and who knows, maybe some unexpected pest comes out of the woodwork and destroys agriculture in India. Like the story about rabbits in Australia, ecosystems are really complex and wiping out a species or introducing a new one can really mess things up.
Also my impression was that the proposal is not to wipe out literally all mosquitoes, but a few species, out of thousands, that specialize in targeting humans. This seems much less dangerous than trying to delete the entire family, which I'd suspect we aren't capable of anyway.
The answer is "kill of the single most potent malaria vector species and see what happens".
Individual species of all sorts die off all the time without collapsing the ecology, and mosquitoes pack so many generations into such a short span that understanding the consequences of blotting a single species out will take under a decade. If minimal, then we can feel fairly comfortable keeping the tool in reserve if malaria itself responds to evolutionary pressure and becomes able to use other species as vectors.
I'll also note that if the... people... (this was not my initial word choice) who value mosquitoes over humans were in charge in 1947 you, personally, would know dozens of people in your hometown who died of malaria today, and would most likely have contracted it at least once yourself. Before 1900 roughly 5% of deaths in Alabama were due to malaria.
I'd probably know someone who died of malaria, FFS! Even as far north as PA, NJ, or NY the figure was between 0.5% and 1%.
I guess nobody here is into fishing—without mosquitos, trout and a whole lot of other species will starve is my understanding (but I guess economists don’t care about stuff like that). BTW not all mosquitos are known disease vectors.
I hope they're right, a world without mosquitos could be really good for humans, but I strongly suspect it's impossible to map out the consequences although I am certainly no expert on this.
We've wiped out quite a few species already, and have twisted quite a few others over millennia of selective breeding to basically become enslaved grass processors that produce yummy flesh and milk that we can eat.
Not sure where to put this, but I am puzzled by Matt’s notion that this about “science magic” that will somehow “kill all mosquitos.” What they are talking about is releasing enough GMO sterile males to drastically reduce fertility of the targeted species and reduce their numbers by ninety-something percent, which could eventually lead to that species becoming extinct, maybe. But it wouldn’t be all mosquitos, just the disease-carrying ones that bite people.
No, that's the "kill most of the mosquitos periodically" plan.
The "kill *all* the mosquitos" plan is to release fertile GMO mosquitos with a CRISPR based gene drive that inserts some maladaptive gene in a way that ensures that all offspring rather than just half inherit it. The simplest to understand approach is a gene that makes all the female offspring infertile while the male offspring remain fertile and run around mating more and spreading the gene further. That's the science magic I won't claim to understand any better than Matt.
Quibble, but I wouldn't say that human life and flourishing is meaningful in and of itself, but that we collectively decide it is meaningful, so it is.
It's an assertion in the face of an uncaring universe, rather than some quasi-magical objective fact.
I think we're in the same neighborhood of agreement, but,
a) I think you are overestimating what it takes for something to be an objective fact (eg my preference for pizza over shrimp grounds the objective fact -- it really is an objective fact! -- that I prefer pizza to shrimp);
and
b) I think decision, even collective decision, plays a smaller role than you think in the meaningfulness of human life. It's meaningful because of the way we're constructed, not because of a decision we made. (Corollary: we could not decide to make human flourishing meaningless. We could decide to act as though it is, and as a result we could make a whole lot of people wretched and unhappy. But it would be a catastrophe to act that way exactly because we would be missing out on something that continued to be valuable, despite our pretending it wasn't.)
But I should also say that I am not giving my own views here, just addressing an apparent contradiction in Yglesias thought (sc. life is meaningless vs. life is good). Maybe Matt thinks that life is good because of a collective decision. I doubt that's how he'll go, but perhaps it is.
Nice call-back to the "that's life" sub-theme, which "is a concept I tend to invoke when I think other people are confusing the specific aspects of a situation with its more general properties."
In this case, the specific aspects are the Bangalorean contentment in the face of material deprivation, and your resumption of American attitudes on your return. The general property is that humans are good at adapting to whatever surroundings we find ourselves in, and our subjective sense of well-being is surprisingly stable independently of our external circumstances and transient events.
People can be happy in the most extreme circumstances. Unless they're British, in which case it's all moan whinge and snivel.
Maybe they smoke less. I've recently read three books by Western writers (Devla Murphy and Ella Maillard) about traveling across Afghanistan. Both of them marveled about the natives white straight teeth. They also were apparently happy in their mud huts. It's interesting the Afghan have showed off the Brits, Russians and Americans in the last 175 years. Apparently they like their dental care and way of life.
"Achieving happiness sometimes requires abandoning the pursuit for meaning."
I think it's clearer to say: externally-grounded meaning. Don't abandon the pursuit for meaning, just abandon the idea that it needs to be found in something larger than human flourishing. The happiness of human beings has meaning, is meaningful. In itself.
If we had a proper tax on corporate income (zero except as a way of taxing non-tax residents), corporate income imputed to owners and taxed as ordinary income, and indexed capital gains were also taxed as ordinary income with no mark-up on inheritance, we would not need to worry about this tradeoff :)
And the advantage of eliminating the capital gains rate would be that investors would have to pay tax on inflation, which would encourage the government to inflate away the debt.
(Unpopular) opinion of a native Texan who lived in the DMV for a little over 3 years: The summers there would not be considered that bad if the residents would just dress for the heat. You see all these people walking around in mid-90s weather wearing suits and ties, talking about the terrible humidity. If all of DC would just agree that in July and August the dress code becomes "Miami business casual", they would be able to recognize just how good they've got it.
I have spent precisely zero time learning Latin, and thus I'm sure I will blatantly make grammatical errors all the time. I'll try to remember that one for next time, though.
The judge example is more like wearing a uniform, which as you mention serves a function of identifiability. And if you're in the actual wedding ensemble, then OK, I guess there's some sort of performance function there. But just generic rules to suit (heh) someone's subjective aesthetics? Nope.
I agree and think their cleverness is going to bite them in the fall. What btw is with Kyrsten Sinema and carried interest? ? Is this a deeply held belief or her carrying water for her donors? Even Bill Ackman thinks it's BS.
I actually like her proposed replacement much better. A tax on stock buybacks will probably raise more revenue, and it actually addresses a problem in the finance industry, that of executives manipulating stock prices. Changing carried interest timeframes really just seems like punching hedge-funds for the sake of punching hedge funds.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. There's already too much focus on the Twitter Bubble zeitgeist and we see politicians, particularly in the House, devoting more and more staff resources to social media and communications at the expense of policy.
MY seems to have different, more snarky and less gracious behavior on Twitter. That isn't a dig on him, that just what the platform incentivizes.
I think reporters are more of the problem than congressional staffers. Reporters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and it really seems to affect their coverage. So. I think that the channel to affecting policy is through setting the media agenda.
Side note, easily the best thing Elon Musk could do for Democrats is to just shut Twitter down.
You should be seeing his tweets in your home feed, but it's possible the algo is feeding you a mix of other crap as well. Assuming that's the problem, to get around it, at the top middle of your home page, click the little star-like image and select sort by latest tweets instead of top ones.
And as I understand this, you might have to click this a few times over time in order for Twitter to get the hint, otherwise they'll nudge you back to the bad algorithmic view.
I'm assuming you have an account? I didn't for a while, but twitter kept blocking me from reading past a couple of tweets, so I finally gave in and created one.
I was just virtue singling how truly little I know about Twitter. :) Yes, I somehow acquired an account sometime in the past, even noted down my password. And sure enough when I logged in, there was Matt!
I coded myself a custom Twitter feed, so I may not be the right person to ask this. Without that, I'd otherwise just go directly to his account (twitter.com/mattyglesias) and read what he's saying there. Also add "/with_replies" to the end of that if you want to see how he's interacting with other users.
I have two experiences which have soured me on what was probably the well-intentioned ADA. The first is that I live in a town which used to be rural/exurban but has seen a significant increase in population the last twenty years. It's more urban and walkable now but unfortunately the streets were built without sidewalks. The town wanted to add sidewalks and got partway through the planning process but the ADA (or perhaps it was a state law similar to the ADA, I'm not 100% sure) said that any new sidewalks had to be wide enough for two wheelchair users to pass each other on the sidewalk, which if you think about means that the sidewalks have to be incredibly wide compared to ones installed earlier. Unfortunately, this meant the town would have to eminent-domain too much land from the abutting property owners and make it too expensive so the idea was canceled. Which means that wheelchair users are actually worse off as now they have to ride up the side of the street.
My second negative experience with this law is that my brother-in-law owned an animal-feed store in the central valley in California that wasn't wheelchair accessible. He got sued by a lawyer in a wheelchair who lived two counties away, didn't own any animals, and passed two other feed stores to get to his. The cost of the judgement against him and the required improvements to the building in order to be compliant were more than he could afford so he instead closed down the business. So wheelchair users who need animal feed are no better off than they were beforehand.
For your first anecdote, a quick search indicates that passing lanes (5-ft wide) only need to be incorporated every 200 ft and can include things like driveways; otherwise the width just needs to be 3 ft. Of course, it may be that there is a more stringent requirement in your town!
It really feels like ADA compliance should be handled more like health and safety inspections, where complaints prompt inspections and compliance deadlines.
Our tendency to try enforcing laws through the profit motive seems uh bad.
If nothing else, there should be a Safe Harbor provision where you can pay for an annual inspection that confirms you are compliant and then any case would be dismissed.
Obviously, to the extent that your compliance relies on corporate policy rather than physical facilities, then the plaintiff might be able overcome the dismissal by demonstrating that staff were not actually complying with the policy (e.g. if there is a separate entrance for wheelchair users that was locked, or the accessible toilet was unhygenic due to not being cleaned, even though the non-accessible toilets were clean).
But that last is an understandable risk - you always know that if your staff treat customers badly, then you run a risk of being sued; the ADA doesn't really change that.
One of the problems with the ADA is that it sets a standard that isn't all that clear and isn't defined - and delegates the power to define how accessible things have to be and how quickly they have to come into compliance to the courts, rather than to administrative rule-making. Which means that instead of there being an OSHA guide you can follow and inspections to confirm that you are compliant, you have to ask a lawyer who will say "you'll get sued for that; you'll be OK with that; that last one, you might win and you might lose, depending on how good your lawyer is, how good their lawyer is, and which judge you get".
As a Brit who grew up in the eighties, I have to admit that "enthusiastically back the IRA" stopped me in my tracks for a moment until I realised the context.
I'm waiting for some major bill to use the acronym IPA so I can make jokes about the people with Very Strong Opinions one way or the other on India Pale Ale.
Minimum withdrawal rates. It's been clear for 50 years the rates and withdrawal period are subject to current political whims, they could change, people encouraged to save for retirement would be screwed and their increased taxes would fund tax cuts for the wealthy. What else is new. My advice is save the max you can in taxable, non-retirement, accounts. There are a lot of rich people who have a lot invested in accounts they're counting on getting a step-up in basis on when they die, and you should too. That said, the rich too may get too greedy, step-up in basis disappear and you (or your heirs) will be back to the soup kitchen. No escaping political whims.
In a purely American context I find the overload with "Individual Retirement Account" a bit more double-take inducing. At least the Irish Republican Army's heyday is receding into the past, but the primary alternative to the 401(k) is still very much a thing!
The funny thing about Matt's "that's life" habit is that this reflects the totally banal, psychologically healthy recognition that life is not always as we would wish it to be, so rather than rage against reality we ought to find ways to advance our objectives working within those constraints. But it seems like that's part of what makes Matt such a distinctive and polarizing voice on Twitter, because there raging about and bemoaning how terrible things are and how they ought to be different is practically a recreational activity, and it seems to infuriate people when someone doesn't participate in it.
It wasn't perfect, but it's always weird to hear these stories (largely from people who were frankly, from more well-off families than I was) about how school was this terrible place they hated, when I, as a poor smart kid who wasn't the most charismatic or best looking, still did perfectly well, wasn't bullied (outside of like one weird incident in 1st grade that barely counts), and largely enjoyed the vast majority of time, yet every podcaster, Silicon Valley-adjacent person on Twitter, etc. have these horror stories, and I'm like, was my school in exurban Florida in the late 90's some weird outlier?
you're definitely not. Must be a selection bias. We all like to use the comments mostly to critique so naturally those who had mostly good school experience would be less drawn to share?
not sure, but on a different point I think school experience really biases us (or better, shapes our views). I think Matty mentioned he didn't like his school at all. I think that's a big reason why he is generally cynical about good schools and the inherent value of education, even though today he demonstrated he is not a fanatic in his materialist approach to the subject. I think the same goes for a lot of the commentators. But the converse is also true. I am a big believer in quality education, beyond "connections" material benefit, etc. but rather the value of the actual academic stuff and the teaching itself and that it matters a ton if you're in a good school or not. I do have good arguments for this (I hope), but I also think my good subjective personal experience must be affecting my judgement as well. I've seen what it can be like so I believe in it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I thought it was mainly when people used it pejoratively, but I'd always appreciate a clarification from Matt so I'm not stuck under a false assumption.
Really? Had no idea. Did he mention it here at any point (not all of us are on Twitter…)? anyhow the idea of course is MattY, which many here use and I thought is neat but I can revert to MY I suppose
I can't recall him mentioning it here, but I don't see a lot of people do it here either. It's probably not a super big deal to do it every now and then, but I wanted to flag it to you because I used to sometimes use it myself from all the way back in his ThinkProgress days and when I found out he disliked it, it made me feel bad because I was never intending to be rude by the use of it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I skimmed that ecomodernism manifesto, and it seemed to me that it could fit in as a subset of the agenda that I'm thinking more and more is the correct one for any society of the world: an agenda of abundance. I can think of ways to craft that in either a left wing or right wing valence, but every day I get deeper into thinking that that's the way forward.
Well, Matt didn't answer my question about expounding on how the legal system is bullshit, but one of my guesses as to why was related to "the whole American culture of adversarial legalism is bad" (and I can certainly agree with much of that), so I still found that informative.
If you're referring to his comments to Dilan Esper I also wonder about this and really want him to answer. I get his point around the supreme court but the generalized version doesn't stand scrutiny IMO (even if there are parts where it's true).
I should hope that was only in reference to a small sphere of constitutional SC decisions, because otherwise it's a very foolish, dilettantish think to believe. You can't claim to be interested in and care about public policy and governance but turn your nose up and dismiss the last mile of how policies get implemented, through the legal system, as mere "details". As often as not, the devil is in the details, and it's malpractice for a policy designer or commenter not to pay attention to that in many cases.
Yes, that’s the one I meant - someone (a lawyer I believe) retweeted it and commented that this perspective largely stems from a focus on Supreme Court decisions only. That person and Dilan then elaborated on it a bit if I remember right. Sorry for the confusion.
Yes, but it really depends on how good the courts are. One of the most unsung achievements of progressive 1930s thinking was the adoption in 1937 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a sea change in modernizing and streamlining to court system to more quickly and efficiently resolve disputes on the merits rather than rewarding endless lawyer BS. But we're past due for another major overhaul of the court system -- in particular to move away from the one-size-fits all approach that treats a dispute over $75k the same as one of $100 million, and ideally, to move administrative law judges out of the Presidential/executive branch chain of command and directly into the Article 3 org chart.
I just think we massively under invest in our judicial system given how much of an advantage it is for our society. Its waaaaay to slow to actually get a case through the system most of the time. We spent less than 8 billion on the federal judiciary in 2022. That's ~.2% of the federal budget! We should up that by 50% at least.
Not as sure where states are, but suspect similar things there.
Agree completely. And our failure to invest in courts is also part of why they've been losing ground to privatized dispute resolution alternatives, such as arbitration.
So long as private arbitration is a choice then I think it can be a good alternative. Especially between two or more large players.
However, its usually often not available for small parties and there the delay can be horrific. Was recently talking with someone who has a dispute with a small business. Its been almost a year and the case has barely had anything done much less reached trial. The time delay has magnified the potential loss for both parties dramatically.
I understand how it seems conceptually cleaner to have judges doing judge things be under Article 3, but what specific failings of the ALJ system is moving them to Article 3 status going to solve?
As a litigator, I have the same question. I'm at a loss as to how making it functionally impossible to fire bankruptcy judges and magistrate judges is going to significantly improve the quality of justice they are delivering. (For context, these are already considered pretty desirable legal jobs, so it's not a question of needing to add employment protection to be able to recruit quality candidates for the position, in my experience.)
I don't follow. I'm not suggesting any change to bankruptcy or magistrate judges, but rather to move ALJs from the Executive Branch over into the judiciary, to serve in a similar manner as bankruptcy and magistrate judges do now -- for limited terms within the Article 3 org chart, appointed and supervised by life-tenured circuit and district judges. The point is the remove power from the President, and limit the executive branch to administering and enforcing laws -- no legislating and no adjudicating. One President or department head shouldn't be in charge of the lawmaker who writes the regulation, prosecutor who enforces it, and the judge who adjudicates it. That's the clear design and structure of our Constitution and it takes a lot of mental gymnastics and really gaslighting reasoning to deny that, and also introduces other problems that are avoided if we just try to work with the structure we have rather than bucking it.
If I was starting a political party or faction on this idea, I'd call them Constitutional Democrats: the structural constitutional theory of the Federalist Society and the progressive substantive agenda of the Democratic Party. A few elite, I mean small, party.
Sorry, I missed that you were exclusively speaking of ALJs. I thought you were speaking of all Article I judges (which would include bankruptcy and magistrate judges).
Your whole prior paragraph seems like gaslighting and why half the country seems ready to give up on democracy to avoid being under the boot of the 'few elite, small party'. Maybe it's time for Democrats to wise up and change the subject.
Is there any difference between ALJ judges and Article 3 judges except lifetime tenure? I would be absolutely opposed to creating more gerontocracy in the American judiciary.
A lot depends on context (there are many ALJs in different roles across many agencies), but the legal effect of their rulings is entirely different. One bottleneck is that many ALJ decisions are appealable right to federal district judges. If we think ALJs are good and competent, that's a waste.
It's certainly an element of the US being a very market-friendly country- companies can always, always sue regulators about regulation, forcing them to bargain if not actually have rules rescinded. To my understanding no other developed country has anything like that. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is left up to the reader, of course....
That's why you see libertarians these days so enthusiastic about the court system (even with stuff like qualified immunity, which is not a corporate regulation but just an example). They recognize the courts as a separate power center from the legislature & the bureaucracy
A major reason for the prominence of administrative litigation challenging regulations in the US is that so many of our laws are not passed by Congress but are promulgated by Executive Branch agencies through a jerry-built process that doesn't fit our Constitution and is therefore more vulnerable to legal challenge. There's no such thing as an administrative law challenge to an act of Congress.
Many other countries don't have contingency fees and class actions, which fuel the adversarial legalism in America. That plus the Code of Federal Regulations, which is rife with stuff to sue over. I doubt anyone on this site has read it cover to cover, or even a single volume.
To be specific, only a subset of mosquito species spread malaria. Those could be killed with genetic engineering while allowing the ones that do not carry it to remain in ecosystems where they may be an important part of the food chain.
My loose understanding of the technology that would be used for this (CRISPR, used to ensure that the male sex chromosome becomes dominant) is that there would be minimal risk, in theory, of accidentally targeting some of the non-disease carrying species. Is that correct or is there some possibility of cross contamination via hybridization?
I'm glad someone else asked Matt about this technology. It seems to fit extremely well with the pro-progress or ecomodernist outlook, especially since some environmentalists (predictably) think it's bad to make mosquitoes extinct.
Oxitec, a commercial venture of Oxford University, has a control system for Aedes aegypti (not a malaria vector, but a vector for dengue and yellow fever) which is already available to retail consumers in Brazil. They have an "Aedes do Bem" YouTube channel with promotional videos (in Portuguese, but you'll get the idea and it's also a cool-sounding language):
If I understand correctly, this is still semi-experimental, because the GMO mosquitos are designed to be self-limiting. I'm not sure exactly how that works.
(A pure gene-drive modification gives you a male mosquito that fathers more male offspring than normal, but hardly any female offspring. If you release a single one into the environment, theoretically it could make the species go extinct. The Aedes do Bem mosquitos have a modification that somehow wears off after several generations, so it's not expected to do that.)
A fully species-extinguishing gene drive has already been developed for Anopheles gambiae, one of the malaria vector species. It hasn't been commercialized or approved for release but I think if that doesn't happen soon, eventually one of the scientists will just get on a plane to Africa and release some of them illegally:
It's especially exciting that they're testing sex-distorter gene drives in fall armyworm. This pest is native to the Americas but reached Africa in 2016 and has since been devastating farmers' yields, especially for corn. Even if you're an eco-purist and don't think we should tamper with nature, you should still want to make this species extinct in a continent where it doesn't belong.
"...the ones that do not carry it to remain in ecosystems...."
And this would have the additional advantage of encouraging the mosquito-borne microbes to branch out and adapt to new sub-species of mosquitoes. Win-win!
Feels like there's a decent argument that Mexican cultural output has an outsized impact on US cultural output (proximity + migrant population) and US cultural output has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
There's a weaker version of this where Canadian cultural output (and tropes) seeps into the US and from there to the rest of the world in a way that it just wouldn't absent the US as a vector. Would the rest of the world care that Canadian's are (allegedly) very polite if not for American's commenting on it?
for canada, there are a huge number of incredibly influential people from Canada (Drake, the Weeknd, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Shania Twain, Celine Dion). But not sure we consider someone like Neil Young "Canadian cultural output" considering basically his entire music career is based in Los Angeles?
Canadians in Hollywood and Nashville are like Ohioans or Floridians in Hollywood or Nashville - they’re a big group because there’s a big population that moves to these sites of cultural production.
Now not everyone moves to Hollywood or Nashville - Toronto and Montreal and Atlanta and Athens, GA all have significant local music scenes. I don’t know how many of the people you list have their career in Los Angeles or New York or Montreal or what.
To be fair if we thought of it as one state (which we probably shouldn't) it would be either the largest or second largest (after California) state so if anything it might be under-represented relative to say New York State.
Maybe we should be asking whether Ontario population ~15m is under or over represented given it's the home to Drake, Weeknd and Shopify. While British Columbia is home to Ryan Reynolds and Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil are from Quebec.
I don't think New York or California really matches Canada for raw musical artist output, unless you are just saying LA is the home of the music industry, which is a slightly different assertion... like you could argue that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are products of Southern California since they primarily developed in the music scene there but that is a bit of a tautology since the music industry is basically in Southern California and New York...
On a per-capita basis, it seems that Jamaica would be way up there. Not just with the many original forms of Jamaican music, but also with those that grew out of it: primarily rap and hip hop.
"Amtrak ought to care about accessibility and invest in level boarding. But ADA can’t make Amtrak care; all it can do is make Amtrak comply"
I would say, that's life -- laws and regulations can't make people and organizations care, only comply, and beyond requiring literal compliance at best instruct on what society expects. It seems like there's some tension between the above answer and your answer on "that's life", where you wisely accept that there are certain generalizable, predictable aspects of human behavior - such as that people will generally behave in a self-interested, selfish way - and public policy should be designed to accept and work with that, rather than always kicking against it. I remember a core premise of the Cold Warrior critique of communism was that it failed to understand human nature and accept the basic selfishness of people and work with that, and as a result designed a system that required people to act like angels -- to truly care -- for it to function, and that's why it was so dysfunctional (and why some historians liken the USSR to a theocracy, with a priestly nomenklatura class to monitor people's hearts and minds). I still think that's one of the most powerful critiques of technocracy (of which communism was a marquee example), whether it be public health technocrats or others -- highly designed systems that requires constant top-down management tend to run up on the shoals of human behavior.
I’ve been thinking about this problem of a culture of compliance. It’s really frustrating how, when a rule is made to make things accessible, you get the barest minimum of what makes them accessible (if they require a certain grade for the wheelchair ramp, you get a wheelchair ramp that starts at the wrong end of the parking lot and winds in a confusing way; if they require bike parking, you get bike parking that is too close to a wall to effectively use).
I’ve thought that in some cases it would be better if, instead of requiring the minimum in every area, you gave points for different levels and require a certain number of points. (Or perhaps charge higher impact fees for buildings with fewer points.) It seems like it would be better to have many buildings that are comfortably accessible and many that are completely inaccessible than to have every building be technically accessible.
> It seems like it would be better to have many buildings that are comfortably accessible and many that are completely inaccessible than to have every building be technically accessible.
That works as long as they are practically exchangeable, but it breaks down if the inaccessible one(s) also have exactly what the person needs.
I have the opposite take on this. The US, due to the ADA and Bob Dole, spends an inordinate amount of money on sidewalk cuts and making things accessible to something like .001% of the population. I'm all for giving people in a wheel chair help across the highway. I'm not for more rules, spending money wastefully and feeding the litigation beast.
Curb cuts is something that's cheap when done at the same time the sidewalk is built. What's expensive is retrofitting them in afterward.
But, at least curb cuts are useful beyond the 0.001% of the population in wheelchairs. Anybody walking or rolling with anything on wheels, but it a suitcase, stroller, bicycle, or electric scooter, benefits from them.
The part of ADA that I actually have the strongest objection to is unfunded requirements it puts on public transit, particularly the requirement for running door-to-door paratransit along side regular buses, and an insane cost per passenger. If the federal government believes that a door-to-door shuttle service for the disabled is important, the feds should fund it directly. It shouldn't come out of the cost of running regular buses - or worse, induce agencies to shut down all bus service on Sundays, just to avoid the expense of running paratransit on Sundays.
I don't think our takes are opposed. I'm not saying that we need *more* accessibility - I'm saying that what we spend on accessibility should be *useful*. Don't spend $3 million putting a pedestrian bridge over a freeway that requires people to go up and down three flights of stairs and don't put in a wheelchair ramp that requires someone to zigzag seven times around the parking lot. Those satisfy the current law but don't really help anyone. Instead save that money for things that are actually useful for many people, like sidewalk cuts (which are very useful for about 20% of the population, between people with bikes or strollers or knee injuries or whatever, in addition to people in wheelchairs).
Even a pedestrian bridge that requires going up and down three flights of stairs is still extremely useful when the alternative is to walk two miles to the nearest road crossing. Even if that bridge doesn't seem to be getting a lot of use, it's still saving considerable travel time each time it does get used - even with the overhead of going up and down the stairs. I would much rather spend 5 minutes going up and down stairs than an hour walking along a busy, ugly road to the nearest underpass.
I think the better analogy for the pedestrian bridge is not ADA (a bridge that requires walking up stairs is not ADA accessible anyway), but suburban bus routes. A bus route may seem expensive to run and not seem to get used that much, and may also seem to useless to anyone with a car. But, not everybody does have a car, and each time somebody does ride the bus, the bus is immensely useful when the only alternative is to walk 6 miles, each way, along the side of a busy road.
In most cases, it's better to fix up a dozen streets that are in fact commonly used for walking than to make a single one of these bridges that is rarely used. Once in a while, this bridge will save one person 45 minutes of walking time, but doing a bunch of smaller improvements on more appealing routes will actually benefit more people.
This is the problem with cost/benefit calculations. I don’t know anywhere that requires walking five miles to cross the freeway but apparently these places exist, and the people living there want the rest of us to spend $3 million building them a ramp over the highway. Your benefit is my cost.
This discussion reminds me of the Elizabeth Warren proposing a requirement that corporate boards have a member chosen the employees, rather than shareholders. The idea being that it was supposed to make corporations somehow care about employee welfare, but completely oblivious to the fact that such board members would serve only perfunctory rules, and would be outvoted on almost everything.
Matt says that lots of people would benefit - roller suitcases, bad knee, etc.
And that's true!
But Amtrak doesn't seem to think that would be enough of a benefit to spend money on. Of course based on Matt's other posts they don't seem to think very well about how to improve boarding - just fancier stations.
So... I don't see how the adversarial legalism has anything to do with it. Amtrak doesn't seem to think passengers care enough about it for it to be worth it for them to fix.
And of course, maybe it isn't! If it is too expensive to fix and not worth enough then we should be ok with them doing the minimum cost so they can spend the money on more important things (not that they're doing this)
This is where I think it would be better for the law to somehow make clear how important the issue is, so that the managers would figure out whether to put a little effort into a tiny improvement or a lot of effort into a full one, rather than mandate some predetermined level of effort (which may involve more effort than is worthwhile for the tiny benefit it gives but less than something that would be transformatively valuable).
The way to do this is probably the appointments process. Party leadership needs to commit itself to the idea that it’s important and make that the litmus test for the appointees with charge over it. That may provide the stable, long-term focus necessary to shift the culture.
I agree with the sentiment but I have no idea how you'd accomplish that with a law.
I would expect that that's kind of what social pressure, norms, and standards are for. And partly why I dislike it when people flagrantly violate norms for convenience/personal gain with 'well it isn't illegal' (It's different if they actually think the norm is incorrect - e.g. the gay rights movement (yeah there were _also_ laws))). If laws are bad at it, and norms are ignored... what's left?
Yeah, I think it's hard. The idea I have is to make these things somehow points based - you can get a certain number of points for meeting current minimum energy efficiency standards and more points for hitting higher targets; another number of points for meeting current minimum wheelchair accessibility standards and more for hitting higher targets; etc. Then require a minimum total number of points, and give some sort of reward or recognition for hitting higher numbers of points.
But it seems very hard to calibrate these points, and not just result in a new de facto set of standards where everyone hits the minimum on one criterion and level four on another because that's the cheapest way to hit the target.
I'd say that Mexico only punches above its weight from an American perspective, because it's right next door so you pay a lot of attention to it. From Europe, most European countries are more culturally relevant, and I think a lot of people would list several South American countries ahead of Mexico as well, though I'm not sure.
I'm very excited to have a new Metric album, they have also always been one of my favourite bands, though I haven't paid much attention over the years. As some reviewer said about another of my favourites, Garbage – they weren't really missed, but I'm glad they're back.
This seems plausible. Would be interested to hear from some European commenters on this.
It does not seem like the language barrier necessarily prevents smaller European countries from penetrating the broader European pop culture landscape. You have lots of weird hits come out of the Eurovision song contest for instance. There was that Numa Numa song a while back.
To preemptively answer, I was very confused about the premise of that mailbag question, because I knew little about Mexican culture (essentially only María la del Barrio or something) before coming to the US (and I don't believe I know much more now that I've come here, but maybe the PhD is to blame for the lack of free time to learn more things). If you asked me about one Latin American country that is known culturally, I would say Colombia. After that, probably Brazil and Argentina. Cuba, as well, because we still have pre-1989 diehards.
As far as Eurovision is concerned, the right answer, of course, is Verka Serduchka.
So I live in Europe having been raised in Canada, my impression is that music is one of the things that crosses least. Films (especially film directors) and authors tend to be most widely known, television shows sometimes get across (e.g. Turkish soap operas) but they're more likely to be adapted – actors also can ofren get good work across Europe once successful t homee I'd say a middle class European can name at least an author, a director and a food from every mid-size country and up, and maybe say 'cheers' and name a beer brand.
"I think Freddie deBoer’s obsession with the positional aspects of education is bizarre. I imagine some 18th-century version of FDB explaining that there’s no point in investing in mass literacy education because the kids of the elite will just come up with some new arbitrary signal that they belong on the top of the heap."
This seems to miss the point. FDB is not arguing that education is bullshit, and that it's not possible to teach people stuff. He's arguing there's no evidence to suggest that the relative attainment of smarts and knowledge is movable by the education system of the last 100 years. Smart kids do well; less smart kids do less well. Throwing tons and tons of money at this has not helped. And since the American economy gives vast rewards to people with top-end educational credentials, this seems like a germane topic of discussion. It's orthogonal to the inherent moral benefits of education.
The point is that the average student in 2022 (hopefully) performs better than the average student in 1922. Not relative to their own peers, but relative to the average in 1922.
Literacy is a good one to bring up because it’s so obviously transformative. Whatever its moral qualities, it’s just better to have a world where I can throw a manual at you rather than be on hand to personally help you.
I agree that's MY's point, and I don't disagree with anything you said. And as far as I know, neither does FDB. All of these things are to the good. But as I said, FDB's "obsession" has large material ramifications for society, because the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
I agree about FDB, reading that question killed me, and Matt's response was no picnic either.
It's obvious to me why Freddie spends so much time on relative attainment: almost all educational research and policy is driven by the idea that it will increase social mobility.
Hard-boiled Matt:
"...life just is the way it is and has the meaning (or lack thereof) that it has. So there’s nothing to be sad about."
Emo Matt:
“it’s good for human beings to exist and flourish.”
I suspect your real position is that the goodness of human flourishing is a basic source of value and meaning for human lives: human life is not meaningless, but instead meaningful in itself, not in virtue of depending on some larger (eg theological) structure of meaning.
Meaning is like value in this respect: when we say that human flourishing is valuable in itself, not because it contributes to the socialist revolution or the GDP, we are saying that it really is valuable, even though it does not depend for that value on some larger structure of value. It's non-derivatively valuable, and non-derivatively meaningful.
This might sadden people who wanted human value to be grounded in a grander story about our central place in divine creation (eg) or our leadership in the future intergalactic federation. To them you say: no need to look for a meaning external to human flourishing, when that itself is the source of meaning. No reason to be sad about the lack of an external grounding: it's meaningful in itself.
There is still plenty to be sad about on other grounds, mostly the gap between how few human lives go well and how many human lives could go well if we did all of this stuff (govt, economy, society, etc) a bit better. But responding to that gap with hope and motivation is better than responding to it with (mere) sadness.
"the goodness of human flourishing is a basic source of value and meaning for human lives"
+100
Well said!
Like I'm going to believe a creature that spends its whole life seeking fructose and acetic acid?
If you knew anything about the value of human lives, you'd at least seek out ethanol.
There now, it's not true that a fruit fly's whole life is spent "seeking fructose and acetic acid." There's also egg-laying and sex!
And flying. That’s pretty cool.
I love Matt, but geez, the American analytic tradition is so bankrupt. There’s no moral trade off worth mentioning in killing off mosquitoes? No one is going to read the American tradition after the end of our empire. It has less salvageable material than the famously inscrutable debates of the Scholastics.
It doesn't even have to be a moral tradeoff - from my understanding mosquitos fill a population control niche in ecology. Destroy all the mosquitos and who knows, maybe some unexpected pest comes out of the woodwork and destroys agriculture in India. Like the story about rabbits in Australia, ecosystems are really complex and wiping out a species or introducing a new one can really mess things up.
I think people have looked into this, and -suspect- that it shouldn't have significant downstream effects on ecosystems.
But with a complex system, who knows?
Also my impression was that the proposal is not to wipe out literally all mosquitoes, but a few species, out of thousands, that specialize in targeting humans. This seems much less dangerous than trying to delete the entire family, which I'd suspect we aren't capable of anyway.
The answer is "kill of the single most potent malaria vector species and see what happens".
Individual species of all sorts die off all the time without collapsing the ecology, and mosquitoes pack so many generations into such a short span that understanding the consequences of blotting a single species out will take under a decade. If minimal, then we can feel fairly comfortable keeping the tool in reserve if malaria itself responds to evolutionary pressure and becomes able to use other species as vectors.
I'll also note that if the... people... (this was not my initial word choice) who value mosquitoes over humans were in charge in 1947 you, personally, would know dozens of people in your hometown who died of malaria today, and would most likely have contracted it at least once yourself. Before 1900 roughly 5% of deaths in Alabama were due to malaria.
I'd probably know someone who died of malaria, FFS! Even as far north as PA, NJ, or NY the figure was between 0.5% and 1%.
Yeah, I'm certainly still willing to try it for the handful of mosquito species that are most likely to transmit malaria.
Sorry, that wasn't intended as a rebuttal to you, just a comment.
I guess nobody here is into fishing—without mosquitos, trout and a whole lot of other species will starve is my understanding (but I guess economists don’t care about stuff like that). BTW not all mosquitos are known disease vectors.
I hope they're right, a world without mosquitos could be really good for humans, but I strongly suspect it's impossible to map out the consequences although I am certainly no expert on this.
We've wiped out quite a few species already, and have twisted quite a few others over millennia of selective breeding to basically become enslaved grass processors that produce yummy flesh and milk that we can eat.
What is one more set of species?
I guess mosquitos pollenate?
Not sure where to put this, but I am puzzled by Matt’s notion that this about “science magic” that will somehow “kill all mosquitos.” What they are talking about is releasing enough GMO sterile males to drastically reduce fertility of the targeted species and reduce their numbers by ninety-something percent, which could eventually lead to that species becoming extinct, maybe. But it wouldn’t be all mosquitos, just the disease-carrying ones that bite people.
No, that's the "kill most of the mosquitos periodically" plan.
The "kill *all* the mosquitos" plan is to release fertile GMO mosquitos with a CRISPR based gene drive that inserts some maladaptive gene in a way that ensures that all offspring rather than just half inherit it. The simplest to understand approach is a gene that makes all the female offspring infertile while the male offspring remain fertile and run around mating more and spreading the gene further. That's the science magic I won't claim to understand any better than Matt.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02087-5
Quibble, but I wouldn't say that human life and flourishing is meaningful in and of itself, but that we collectively decide it is meaningful, so it is.
It's an assertion in the face of an uncaring universe, rather than some quasi-magical objective fact.
*returns to half-assedly gazing at navel*
I think we're in the same neighborhood of agreement, but,
a) I think you are overestimating what it takes for something to be an objective fact (eg my preference for pizza over shrimp grounds the objective fact -- it really is an objective fact! -- that I prefer pizza to shrimp);
and
b) I think decision, even collective decision, plays a smaller role than you think in the meaningfulness of human life. It's meaningful because of the way we're constructed, not because of a decision we made. (Corollary: we could not decide to make human flourishing meaningless. We could decide to act as though it is, and as a result we could make a whole lot of people wretched and unhappy. But it would be a catastrophe to act that way exactly because we would be missing out on something that continued to be valuable, despite our pretending it wasn't.)
But I should also say that I am not giving my own views here, just addressing an apparent contradiction in Yglesias thought (sc. life is meaningless vs. life is good). Maybe Matt thinks that life is good because of a collective decision. I doubt that's how he'll go, but perhaps it is.
That has basically been my thinking since my junior year in college.
[psst! Not everyone knows that the true meaning of life is nice teeth! Don't blab it around, okay?]
Nice call-back to the "that's life" sub-theme, which "is a concept I tend to invoke when I think other people are confusing the specific aspects of a situation with its more general properties."
In this case, the specific aspects are the Bangalorean contentment in the face of material deprivation, and your resumption of American attitudes on your return. The general property is that humans are good at adapting to whatever surroundings we find ourselves in, and our subjective sense of well-being is surprisingly stable independently of our external circumstances and transient events.
People can be happy in the most extreme circumstances. Unless they're British, in which case it's all moan whinge and snivel.
Maybe they smoke less. I've recently read three books by Western writers (Devla Murphy and Ella Maillard) about traveling across Afghanistan. Both of them marveled about the natives white straight teeth. They also were apparently happy in their mud huts. It's interesting the Afghan have showed off the Brits, Russians and Americans in the last 175 years. Apparently they like their dental care and way of life.
"Achieving happiness sometimes requires abandoning the pursuit for meaning."
I think it's clearer to say: externally-grounded meaning. Don't abandon the pursuit for meaning, just abandon the idea that it needs to be found in something larger than human flourishing. The happiness of human beings has meaning, is meaningful. In itself.
So carried interest was put in just so Sinema could reject and counter it with stock buy back tax? Dems finally not bottling something for once?
They're kind of on a roll all of a sudden. It's astounding.
If we had a proper tax on corporate income (zero except as a way of taxing non-tax residents), corporate income imputed to owners and taxed as ordinary income, and indexed capital gains were also taxed as ordinary income with no mark-up on inheritance, we would not need to worry about this tradeoff :)
And the advantage of eliminating the capital gains rate would be that investors would have to pay tax on inflation, which would encourage the government to inflate away the debt.
I disagree. The failure to index is a huge distortion. And politically it promotes "indexing" on inheritance.
😂 it’s possible I may have been joking.
It's certain that I mis-read your comment. :)
(Unpopular) opinion of a native Texan who lived in the DMV for a little over 3 years: The summers there would not be considered that bad if the residents would just dress for the heat. You see all these people walking around in mid-90s weather wearing suits and ties, talking about the terrible humidity. If all of DC would just agree that in July and August the dress code becomes "Miami business casual", they would be able to recognize just how good they've got it.
Dress codes delenda est.
Dress codes are plural, not? Delendae sunt !
But should they? If people show up to your wedding in jeans or if you can’t recognise a judge in function etc.
I have spent precisely zero time learning Latin, and thus I'm sure I will blatantly make grammatical errors all the time. I'll try to remember that one for next time, though.
The judge example is more like wearing a uniform, which as you mention serves a function of identifiability. And if you're in the actual wedding ensemble, then OK, I guess there's some sort of performance function there. But just generic rules to suit (heh) someone's subjective aesthetics? Nope.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to optimize one's clothes for both the heat outside and the over air-conditioned buildings inside.
Wouldn't need to over air condition the indoors if everyone's not forced to dress to the nines.
I also hear that it’s hard for women in particular to optimize their clothing to over air-conditioned buildings.
Yep, because it gets optimized instead for men that are shackled in suits.
The DCCC shenanigans have made me feel extra secure about my choice to never give them donations.
I agree and think their cleverness is going to bite them in the fall. What btw is with Kyrsten Sinema and carried interest? ? Is this a deeply held belief or her carrying water for her donors? Even Bill Ackman thinks it's BS.
I actually like her proposed replacement much better. A tax on stock buybacks will probably raise more revenue, and it actually addresses a problem in the finance industry, that of executives manipulating stock prices. Changing carried interest timeframes really just seems like punching hedge-funds for the sake of punching hedge funds.
“But in truth, my tweets are probably more influential than the columns. “
That makes me sad because Twitter is bad in so many levels.
It makes me sad because it suggests staffers either don't have the time or the attention span for a deeper dive than a tweet.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. There's already too much focus on the Twitter Bubble zeitgeist and we see politicians, particularly in the House, devoting more and more staff resources to social media and communications at the expense of policy.
MY seems to have different, more snarky and less gracious behavior on Twitter. That isn't a dig on him, that just what the platform incentivizes.
I think reporters are more of the problem than congressional staffers. Reporters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and it really seems to affect their coverage. So. I think that the channel to affecting policy is through setting the media agenda.
Side note, easily the best thing Elon Musk could do for Democrats is to just shut Twitter down.
I don't think Elon is interested in doing something good for democrats.... or was that your point?
It is a vicious circle.
My fiery hot take is that on balance, Twitter is good.
Woah but it’s just so bad!
The bad stuff just drowns out all the attention from the good stuff.
Stupid, personal Twitter question. I clicked "follow" Matt some time go and nothing happened. Do I have to go looking every day?
You should be seeing his tweets in your home feed, but it's possible the algo is feeding you a mix of other crap as well. Assuming that's the problem, to get around it, at the top middle of your home page, click the little star-like image and select sort by latest tweets instead of top ones.
And as I understand this, you might have to click this a few times over time in order for Twitter to get the hint, otherwise they'll nudge you back to the bad algorithmic view.
I have a home page? :) :)
twitter.com/home
I'm assuming you have an account? I didn't for a while, but twitter kept blocking me from reading past a couple of tweets, so I finally gave in and created one.
I was just virtue singling how truly little I know about Twitter. :) Yes, I somehow acquired an account sometime in the past, even noted down my password. And sure enough when I logged in, there was Matt!
I coded myself a custom Twitter feed, so I may not be the right person to ask this. Without that, I'd otherwise just go directly to his account (twitter.com/mattyglesias) and read what he's saying there. Also add "/with_replies" to the end of that if you want to see how he's interacting with other users.
I have two experiences which have soured me on what was probably the well-intentioned ADA. The first is that I live in a town which used to be rural/exurban but has seen a significant increase in population the last twenty years. It's more urban and walkable now but unfortunately the streets were built without sidewalks. The town wanted to add sidewalks and got partway through the planning process but the ADA (or perhaps it was a state law similar to the ADA, I'm not 100% sure) said that any new sidewalks had to be wide enough for two wheelchair users to pass each other on the sidewalk, which if you think about means that the sidewalks have to be incredibly wide compared to ones installed earlier. Unfortunately, this meant the town would have to eminent-domain too much land from the abutting property owners and make it too expensive so the idea was canceled. Which means that wheelchair users are actually worse off as now they have to ride up the side of the street.
My second negative experience with this law is that my brother-in-law owned an animal-feed store in the central valley in California that wasn't wheelchair accessible. He got sued by a lawyer in a wheelchair who lived two counties away, didn't own any animals, and passed two other feed stores to get to his. The cost of the judgement against him and the required improvements to the building in order to be compliant were more than he could afford so he instead closed down the business. So wheelchair users who need animal feed are no better off than they were beforehand.
For your first anecdote, a quick search indicates that passing lanes (5-ft wide) only need to be incorporated every 200 ft and can include things like driveways; otherwise the width just needs to be 3 ft. Of course, it may be that there is a more stringent requirement in your town!
As for your second one, this is definitely a problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html
It really feels like ADA compliance should be handled more like health and safety inspections, where complaints prompt inspections and compliance deadlines.
Our tendency to try enforcing laws through the profit motive seems uh bad.
If nothing else, there should be a Safe Harbor provision where you can pay for an annual inspection that confirms you are compliant and then any case would be dismissed.
Obviously, to the extent that your compliance relies on corporate policy rather than physical facilities, then the plaintiff might be able overcome the dismissal by demonstrating that staff were not actually complying with the policy (e.g. if there is a separate entrance for wheelchair users that was locked, or the accessible toilet was unhygenic due to not being cleaned, even though the non-accessible toilets were clean).
But that last is an understandable risk - you always know that if your staff treat customers badly, then you run a risk of being sued; the ADA doesn't really change that.
One of the problems with the ADA is that it sets a standard that isn't all that clear and isn't defined - and delegates the power to define how accessible things have to be and how quickly they have to come into compliance to the courts, rather than to administrative rule-making. Which means that instead of there being an OSHA guide you can follow and inspections to confirm that you are compliant, you have to ask a lawyer who will say "you'll get sued for that; you'll be OK with that; that last one, you might win and you might lose, depending on how good your lawyer is, how good their lawyer is, and which judge you get".
As a Brit who grew up in the eighties, I have to admit that "enthusiastically back the IRA" stopped me in my tracks for a moment until I realised the context.
I'm waiting for some major bill to use the acronym IPA so I can make jokes about the people with Very Strong Opinions one way or the other on India Pale Ale.
Inclusive Progress Act?
I kept wondering what changes were happening with retirement accounts...
Minimum withdrawal rates. It's been clear for 50 years the rates and withdrawal period are subject to current political whims, they could change, people encouraged to save for retirement would be screwed and their increased taxes would fund tax cuts for the wealthy. What else is new. My advice is save the max you can in taxable, non-retirement, accounts. There are a lot of rich people who have a lot invested in accounts they're counting on getting a step-up in basis on when they die, and you should too. That said, the rich too may get too greedy, step-up in basis disappear and you (or your heirs) will be back to the soup kitchen. No escaping political whims.
It *is* a weird bit of branding, especially given the median age of U.S. Senators overall and U.S. House leadership.
Biden is Irish-American, so it might be intentional.
Yes, that choice of acronym was unfortunate.
In a purely American context I find the overload with "Individual Retirement Account" a bit more double-take inducing. At least the Irish Republican Army's heyday is receding into the past, but the primary alternative to the 401(k) is still very much a thing!
The funny thing about Matt's "that's life" habit is that this reflects the totally banal, psychologically healthy recognition that life is not always as we would wish it to be, so rather than rage against reality we ought to find ways to advance our objectives working within those constraints. But it seems like that's part of what makes Matt such a distinctive and polarizing voice on Twitter, because there raging about and bemoaning how terrible things are and how they ought to be different is practically a recreational activity, and it seems to infuriate people when someone doesn't participate in it.
The responses to the education part make me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth who genuinely liked school.
I quite enjoyed school as well.
It wasn't perfect, but it's always weird to hear these stories (largely from people who were frankly, from more well-off families than I was) about how school was this terrible place they hated, when I, as a poor smart kid who wasn't the most charismatic or best looking, still did perfectly well, wasn't bullied (outside of like one weird incident in 1st grade that barely counts), and largely enjoyed the vast majority of time, yet every podcaster, Silicon Valley-adjacent person on Twitter, etc. have these horror stories, and I'm like, was my school in exurban Florida in the late 90's some weird outlier?
you're definitely not. Must be a selection bias. We all like to use the comments mostly to critique so naturally those who had mostly good school experience would be less drawn to share?
I’m going to guess it’s… damn… I forget the name of it. It’s this bias where cynicism and criticism sound smarter to people, all else equal.
The steady encouragement through that.
not sure, but on a different point I think school experience really biases us (or better, shapes our views). I think Matty mentioned he didn't like his school at all. I think that's a big reason why he is generally cynical about good schools and the inherent value of education, even though today he demonstrated he is not a fanatic in his materialist approach to the subject. I think the same goes for a lot of the commentators. But the converse is also true. I am a big believer in quality education, beyond "connections" material benefit, etc. but rather the value of the actual academic stuff and the teaching itself and that it matters a ton if you're in a good school or not. I do have good arguments for this (I hope), but I also think my good subjective personal experience must be affecting my judgement as well. I've seen what it can be like so I believe in it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I thought it was mainly when people used it pejoratively, but I'd always appreciate a clarification from Matt so I'm not stuck under a false assumption.
Really? Had no idea. Did he mention it here at any point (not all of us are on Twitter…)? anyhow the idea of course is MattY, which many here use and I thought is neat but I can revert to MY I suppose
I can't recall him mentioning it here, but I don't see a lot of people do it here either. It's probably not a super big deal to do it every now and then, but I wanted to flag it to you because I used to sometimes use it myself from all the way back in his ThinkProgress days and when I found out he disliked it, it made me feel bad because I was never intending to be rude by the use of it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I skimmed that ecomodernism manifesto, and it seemed to me that it could fit in as a subset of the agenda that I'm thinking more and more is the correct one for any society of the world: an agenda of abundance. I can think of ways to craft that in either a left wing or right wing valence, but every day I get deeper into thinking that that's the way forward.
"... an agenda of abundance..."
Let a hundred trees bloom, eh?
Only a hundred?
Well, Matt didn't answer my question about expounding on how the legal system is bullshit, but one of my guesses as to why was related to "the whole American culture of adversarial legalism is bad" (and I can certainly agree with much of that), so I still found that informative.
If you're referring to his comments to Dilan Esper I also wonder about this and really want him to answer. I get his point around the supreme court but the generalized version doesn't stand scrutiny IMO (even if there are parts where it's true).
It wasn't to Dilan Esper, I'll have to see if I missed a reply there. On my feed I usually only see him talking with Megan McArdle a lot. Here's the tweet I was referencing: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1553071909016829954
I should hope that was only in reference to a small sphere of constitutional SC decisions, because otherwise it's a very foolish, dilettantish think to believe. You can't claim to be interested in and care about public policy and governance but turn your nose up and dismiss the last mile of how policies get implemented, through the legal system, as mere "details". As often as not, the devil is in the details, and it's malpractice for a policy designer or commenter not to pay attention to that in many cases.
Yes, that’s the one I meant - someone (a lawyer I believe) retweeted it and commented that this perspective largely stems from a focus on Supreme Court decisions only. That person and Dilan then elaborated on it a bit if I remember right. Sorry for the confusion.
The adversarial legal system is good. Hot take
Yes, but it really depends on how good the courts are. One of the most unsung achievements of progressive 1930s thinking was the adoption in 1937 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a sea change in modernizing and streamlining to court system to more quickly and efficiently resolve disputes on the merits rather than rewarding endless lawyer BS. But we're past due for another major overhaul of the court system -- in particular to move away from the one-size-fits all approach that treats a dispute over $75k the same as one of $100 million, and ideally, to move administrative law judges out of the Presidential/executive branch chain of command and directly into the Article 3 org chart.
I just think we massively under invest in our judicial system given how much of an advantage it is for our society. Its waaaaay to slow to actually get a case through the system most of the time. We spent less than 8 billion on the federal judiciary in 2022. That's ~.2% of the federal budget! We should up that by 50% at least.
Not as sure where states are, but suspect similar things there.
Agree completely. And our failure to invest in courts is also part of why they've been losing ground to privatized dispute resolution alternatives, such as arbitration.
So long as private arbitration is a choice then I think it can be a good alternative. Especially between two or more large players.
However, its usually often not available for small parties and there the delay can be horrific. Was recently talking with someone who has a dispute with a small business. Its been almost a year and the case has barely had anything done much less reached trial. The time delay has magnified the potential loss for both parties dramatically.
I understand how it seems conceptually cleaner to have judges doing judge things be under Article 3, but what specific failings of the ALJ system is moving them to Article 3 status going to solve?
As a litigator, I have the same question. I'm at a loss as to how making it functionally impossible to fire bankruptcy judges and magistrate judges is going to significantly improve the quality of justice they are delivering. (For context, these are already considered pretty desirable legal jobs, so it's not a question of needing to add employment protection to be able to recruit quality candidates for the position, in my experience.)
I don't follow. I'm not suggesting any change to bankruptcy or magistrate judges, but rather to move ALJs from the Executive Branch over into the judiciary, to serve in a similar manner as bankruptcy and magistrate judges do now -- for limited terms within the Article 3 org chart, appointed and supervised by life-tenured circuit and district judges. The point is the remove power from the President, and limit the executive branch to administering and enforcing laws -- no legislating and no adjudicating. One President or department head shouldn't be in charge of the lawmaker who writes the regulation, prosecutor who enforces it, and the judge who adjudicates it. That's the clear design and structure of our Constitution and it takes a lot of mental gymnastics and really gaslighting reasoning to deny that, and also introduces other problems that are avoided if we just try to work with the structure we have rather than bucking it.
If I was starting a political party or faction on this idea, I'd call them Constitutional Democrats: the structural constitutional theory of the Federalist Society and the progressive substantive agenda of the Democratic Party. A few elite, I mean small, party.
Sorry, I missed that you were exclusively speaking of ALJs. I thought you were speaking of all Article I judges (which would include bankruptcy and magistrate judges).
Your whole prior paragraph seems like gaslighting and why half the country seems ready to give up on democracy to avoid being under the boot of the 'few elite, small party'. Maybe it's time for Democrats to wise up and change the subject.
Is there any difference between ALJ judges and Article 3 judges except lifetime tenure? I would be absolutely opposed to creating more gerontocracy in the American judiciary.
Sorry to see you being to ageist, although I realize that prejudice is considered acceptable in some progressive quarters.
A lot depends on context (there are many ALJs in different roles across many agencies), but the legal effect of their rulings is entirely different. One bottleneck is that many ALJ decisions are appealable right to federal district judges. If we think ALJs are good and competent, that's a waste.
It's certainly an element of the US being a very market-friendly country- companies can always, always sue regulators about regulation, forcing them to bargain if not actually have rules rescinded. To my understanding no other developed country has anything like that. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is left up to the reader, of course....
That's why you see libertarians these days so enthusiastic about the court system (even with stuff like qualified immunity, which is not a corporate regulation but just an example). They recognize the courts as a separate power center from the legislature & the bureaucracy
A major reason for the prominence of administrative litigation challenging regulations in the US is that so many of our laws are not passed by Congress but are promulgated by Executive Branch agencies through a jerry-built process that doesn't fit our Constitution and is therefore more vulnerable to legal challenge. There's no such thing as an administrative law challenge to an act of Congress.
For sure, but it's much harder to bring down a statute with a constitutional challenge than a regulation with an admin law challenge.
It’s better that some alternatives. It seems that some other countries have setups that involve less adversarial legalism and do better.
Many other countries don't have contingency fees and class actions, which fuel the adversarial legalism in America. That plus the Code of Federal Regulations, which is rife with stuff to sue over. I doubt anyone on this site has read it cover to cover, or even a single volume.
Good God, why would you?
To be specific, only a subset of mosquito species spread malaria. Those could be killed with genetic engineering while allowing the ones that do not carry it to remain in ecosystems where they may be an important part of the food chain.
My loose understanding of the technology that would be used for this (CRISPR, used to ensure that the male sex chromosome becomes dominant) is that there would be minimal risk, in theory, of accidentally targeting some of the non-disease carrying species. Is that correct or is there some possibility of cross contamination via hybridization?
You both have it correct. This Vox article goes into more detail: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/31/17344406/crispr-mosquito-malaria-gene-drive-editing-target-africa-regulation-gmo
I'm glad someone else asked Matt about this technology. It seems to fit extremely well with the pro-progress or ecomodernist outlook, especially since some environmentalists (predictably) think it's bad to make mosquitoes extinct.
Oxitec, a commercial venture of Oxford University, has a control system for Aedes aegypti (not a malaria vector, but a vector for dengue and yellow fever) which is already available to retail consumers in Brazil. They have an "Aedes do Bem" YouTube channel with promotional videos (in Portuguese, but you'll get the idea and it's also a cool-sounding language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uy7lyZPS6I
If I understand correctly, this is still semi-experimental, because the GMO mosquitos are designed to be self-limiting. I'm not sure exactly how that works.
(A pure gene-drive modification gives you a male mosquito that fathers more male offspring than normal, but hardly any female offspring. If you release a single one into the environment, theoretically it could make the species go extinct. The Aedes do Bem mosquitos have a modification that somehow wears off after several generations, so it's not expected to do that.)
A fully species-extinguishing gene drive has already been developed for Anopheles gambiae, one of the malaria vector species. It hasn't been commercialized or approved for release but I think if that doesn't happen soon, eventually one of the scientists will just get on a plane to Africa and release some of them illegally:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0508-1
Latest news from Oxitec:
https://www.oxitec.com/en/news
It's especially exciting that they're testing sex-distorter gene drives in fall armyworm. This pest is native to the Americas but reached Africa in 2016 and has since been devastating farmers' yields, especially for corn. Even if you're an eco-purist and don't think we should tamper with nature, you should still want to make this species extinct in a continent where it doesn't belong.
I believe that that is correct, but it is not my field of expertise.
"...the ones that do not carry it to remain in ecosystems...."
And this would have the additional advantage of encouraging the mosquito-borne microbes to branch out and adapt to new sub-species of mosquitoes. Win-win!
Feels like there's a decent argument that Mexican cultural output has an outsized impact on US cultural output (proximity + migrant population) and US cultural output has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
There's a weaker version of this where Canadian cultural output (and tropes) seeps into the US and from there to the rest of the world in a way that it just wouldn't absent the US as a vector. Would the rest of the world care that Canadian's are (allegedly) very polite if not for American's commenting on it?
for canada, there are a huge number of incredibly influential people from Canada (Drake, the Weeknd, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Shania Twain, Celine Dion). But not sure we consider someone like Neil Young "Canadian cultural output" considering basically his entire music career is based in Los Angeles?
Canadians in Hollywood and Nashville are like Ohioans or Floridians in Hollywood or Nashville - they’re a big group because there’s a big population that moves to these sites of cultural production.
Now not everyone moves to Hollywood or Nashville - Toronto and Montreal and Atlanta and Athens, GA all have significant local music scenes. I don’t know how many of the people you list have their career in Los Angeles or New York or Montreal or what.
I don’t what it means that Celine Dion won Eurovision for Switzerland. I don’t think she’s Swiss. https://www.thelist.com/678948/inside-celine-dions-massive-eurovision-win/
Like the Olympics, it's not uncommon for small countries to "import" foreign talent for competing in Eurovision.
Would they have been as successful if not for their ability to directly cross into the US? Why does Shopify exist in Canada but not in the UK?
yeah culturally Canada is like another state. But Canada is even overrepresented compared to other states I think.
To be fair if we thought of it as one state (which we probably shouldn't) it would be either the largest or second largest (after California) state so if anything it might be under-represented relative to say New York State.
Maybe we should be asking whether Ontario population ~15m is under or over represented given it's the home to Drake, Weeknd and Shopify. While British Columbia is home to Ryan Reynolds and Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil are from Quebec.
I don't think New York or California really matches Canada for raw musical artist output, unless you are just saying LA is the home of the music industry, which is a slightly different assertion... like you could argue that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are products of Southern California since they primarily developed in the music scene there but that is a bit of a tautology since the music industry is basically in Southern California and New York...
Obligatory "They Walk Among Us" clip from "Canadian Bacon": https://youtu.be/pbfBzWJVbX4?t=38
Yes, most Mexican restaurants you see abroad are trying to approximate a Mexican-American restaurant more than a Mexican one.
On a per-capita basis, it seems that Jamaica would be way up there. Not just with the many original forms of Jamaican music, but also with those that grew out of it: primarily rap and hip hop.
"Amtrak ought to care about accessibility and invest in level boarding. But ADA can’t make Amtrak care; all it can do is make Amtrak comply"
I would say, that's life -- laws and regulations can't make people and organizations care, only comply, and beyond requiring literal compliance at best instruct on what society expects. It seems like there's some tension between the above answer and your answer on "that's life", where you wisely accept that there are certain generalizable, predictable aspects of human behavior - such as that people will generally behave in a self-interested, selfish way - and public policy should be designed to accept and work with that, rather than always kicking against it. I remember a core premise of the Cold Warrior critique of communism was that it failed to understand human nature and accept the basic selfishness of people and work with that, and as a result designed a system that required people to act like angels -- to truly care -- for it to function, and that's why it was so dysfunctional (and why some historians liken the USSR to a theocracy, with a priestly nomenklatura class to monitor people's hearts and minds). I still think that's one of the most powerful critiques of technocracy (of which communism was a marquee example), whether it be public health technocrats or others -- highly designed systems that requires constant top-down management tend to run up on the shoals of human behavior.
I’ve been thinking about this problem of a culture of compliance. It’s really frustrating how, when a rule is made to make things accessible, you get the barest minimum of what makes them accessible (if they require a certain grade for the wheelchair ramp, you get a wheelchair ramp that starts at the wrong end of the parking lot and winds in a confusing way; if they require bike parking, you get bike parking that is too close to a wall to effectively use).
I’ve thought that in some cases it would be better if, instead of requiring the minimum in every area, you gave points for different levels and require a certain number of points. (Or perhaps charge higher impact fees for buildings with fewer points.) It seems like it would be better to have many buildings that are comfortably accessible and many that are completely inaccessible than to have every building be technically accessible.
> It seems like it would be better to have many buildings that are comfortably accessible and many that are completely inaccessible than to have every building be technically accessible.
That works as long as they are practically exchangeable, but it breaks down if the inaccessible one(s) also have exactly what the person needs.
I have the opposite take on this. The US, due to the ADA and Bob Dole, spends an inordinate amount of money on sidewalk cuts and making things accessible to something like .001% of the population. I'm all for giving people in a wheel chair help across the highway. I'm not for more rules, spending money wastefully and feeding the litigation beast.
Curb cuts is something that's cheap when done at the same time the sidewalk is built. What's expensive is retrofitting them in afterward.
But, at least curb cuts are useful beyond the 0.001% of the population in wheelchairs. Anybody walking or rolling with anything on wheels, but it a suitcase, stroller, bicycle, or electric scooter, benefits from them.
The part of ADA that I actually have the strongest objection to is unfunded requirements it puts on public transit, particularly the requirement for running door-to-door paratransit along side regular buses, and an insane cost per passenger. If the federal government believes that a door-to-door shuttle service for the disabled is important, the feds should fund it directly. It shouldn't come out of the cost of running regular buses - or worse, induce agencies to shut down all bus service on Sundays, just to avoid the expense of running paratransit on Sundays.
I don't think our takes are opposed. I'm not saying that we need *more* accessibility - I'm saying that what we spend on accessibility should be *useful*. Don't spend $3 million putting a pedestrian bridge over a freeway that requires people to go up and down three flights of stairs and don't put in a wheelchair ramp that requires someone to zigzag seven times around the parking lot. Those satisfy the current law but don't really help anyone. Instead save that money for things that are actually useful for many people, like sidewalk cuts (which are very useful for about 20% of the population, between people with bikes or strollers or knee injuries or whatever, in addition to people in wheelchairs).
Even a pedestrian bridge that requires going up and down three flights of stairs is still extremely useful when the alternative is to walk two miles to the nearest road crossing. Even if that bridge doesn't seem to be getting a lot of use, it's still saving considerable travel time each time it does get used - even with the overhead of going up and down the stairs. I would much rather spend 5 minutes going up and down stairs than an hour walking along a busy, ugly road to the nearest underpass.
I think the better analogy for the pedestrian bridge is not ADA (a bridge that requires walking up stairs is not ADA accessible anyway), but suburban bus routes. A bus route may seem expensive to run and not seem to get used that much, and may also seem to useless to anyone with a car. But, not everybody does have a car, and each time somebody does ride the bus, the bus is immensely useful when the only alternative is to walk 6 miles, each way, along the side of a busy road.
In most cases, it's better to fix up a dozen streets that are in fact commonly used for walking than to make a single one of these bridges that is rarely used. Once in a while, this bridge will save one person 45 minutes of walking time, but doing a bunch of smaller improvements on more appealing routes will actually benefit more people.
This is the problem with cost/benefit calculations. I don’t know anywhere that requires walking five miles to cross the freeway but apparently these places exist, and the people living there want the rest of us to spend $3 million building them a ramp over the highway. Your benefit is my cost.
This discussion reminds me of the Elizabeth Warren proposing a requirement that corporate boards have a member chosen the employees, rather than shareholders. The idea being that it was supposed to make corporations somehow care about employee welfare, but completely oblivious to the fact that such board members would serve only perfunctory rules, and would be outvoted on almost everything.
"such board members would serve only perfunctory rules, and would be outvoted on almost everything"
German cooperations are expected to have such board members, and those board members are not outvoted on almost everything.
Matt says that lots of people would benefit - roller suitcases, bad knee, etc.
And that's true!
But Amtrak doesn't seem to think that would be enough of a benefit to spend money on. Of course based on Matt's other posts they don't seem to think very well about how to improve boarding - just fancier stations.
So... I don't see how the adversarial legalism has anything to do with it. Amtrak doesn't seem to think passengers care enough about it for it to be worth it for them to fix.
And of course, maybe it isn't! If it is too expensive to fix and not worth enough then we should be ok with them doing the minimum cost so they can spend the money on more important things (not that they're doing this)
This is where I think it would be better for the law to somehow make clear how important the issue is, so that the managers would figure out whether to put a little effort into a tiny improvement or a lot of effort into a full one, rather than mandate some predetermined level of effort (which may involve more effort than is worthwhile for the tiny benefit it gives but less than something that would be transformatively valuable).
The way to do this is probably the appointments process. Party leadership needs to commit itself to the idea that it’s important and make that the litmus test for the appointees with charge over it. That may provide the stable, long-term focus necessary to shift the culture.
I agree with the sentiment but I have no idea how you'd accomplish that with a law.
I would expect that that's kind of what social pressure, norms, and standards are for. And partly why I dislike it when people flagrantly violate norms for convenience/personal gain with 'well it isn't illegal' (It's different if they actually think the norm is incorrect - e.g. the gay rights movement (yeah there were _also_ laws))). If laws are bad at it, and norms are ignored... what's left?
Yeah, I think it's hard. The idea I have is to make these things somehow points based - you can get a certain number of points for meeting current minimum energy efficiency standards and more points for hitting higher targets; another number of points for meeting current minimum wheelchair accessibility standards and more for hitting higher targets; etc. Then require a minimum total number of points, and give some sort of reward or recognition for hitting higher numbers of points.
But it seems very hard to calibrate these points, and not just result in a new de facto set of standards where everyone hits the minimum on one criterion and level four on another because that's the cheapest way to hit the target.
I'd say that Mexico only punches above its weight from an American perspective, because it's right next door so you pay a lot of attention to it. From Europe, most European countries are more culturally relevant, and I think a lot of people would list several South American countries ahead of Mexico as well, though I'm not sure.
I'm very excited to have a new Metric album, they have also always been one of my favourite bands, though I haven't paid much attention over the years. As some reviewer said about another of my favourites, Garbage – they weren't really missed, but I'm glad they're back.
This seems plausible. Would be interested to hear from some European commenters on this.
It does not seem like the language barrier necessarily prevents smaller European countries from penetrating the broader European pop culture landscape. You have lots of weird hits come out of the Eurovision song contest for instance. There was that Numa Numa song a while back.
I'm here, ask me anything.
To preemptively answer, I was very confused about the premise of that mailbag question, because I knew little about Mexican culture (essentially only María la del Barrio or something) before coming to the US (and I don't believe I know much more now that I've come here, but maybe the PhD is to blame for the lack of free time to learn more things). If you asked me about one Latin American country that is known culturally, I would say Colombia. After that, probably Brazil and Argentina. Cuba, as well, because we still have pre-1989 diehards.
As far as Eurovision is concerned, the right answer, of course, is Verka Serduchka.
You already know more than me about Mexican culture, and I've lived in the US my entire life. 🤷♂️
On the Colombian front, I was pleasantly surprised that I recognized Encanto as a work of magical realism immediately on watching a trailer, lol.
That's the extent of my Latin American cultural literacy, is a number of half-remembered works I read in school.
So I live in Europe having been raised in Canada, my impression is that music is one of the things that crosses least. Films (especially film directors) and authors tend to be most widely known, television shows sometimes get across (e.g. Turkish soap operas) but they're more likely to be adapted – actors also can ofren get good work across Europe once successful t homee I'd say a middle class European can name at least an author, a director and a food from every mid-size country and up, and maybe say 'cheers' and name a beer brand.
"I think Freddie deBoer’s obsession with the positional aspects of education is bizarre. I imagine some 18th-century version of FDB explaining that there’s no point in investing in mass literacy education because the kids of the elite will just come up with some new arbitrary signal that they belong on the top of the heap."
This seems to miss the point. FDB is not arguing that education is bullshit, and that it's not possible to teach people stuff. He's arguing there's no evidence to suggest that the relative attainment of smarts and knowledge is movable by the education system of the last 100 years. Smart kids do well; less smart kids do less well. Throwing tons and tons of money at this has not helped. And since the American economy gives vast rewards to people with top-end educational credentials, this seems like a germane topic of discussion. It's orthogonal to the inherent moral benefits of education.
The point is that the average student in 2022 (hopefully) performs better than the average student in 1922. Not relative to their own peers, but relative to the average in 1922.
Literacy is a good one to bring up because it’s so obviously transformative. Whatever its moral qualities, it’s just better to have a world where I can throw a manual at you rather than be on hand to personally help you.
I agree that's MY's point, and I don't disagree with anything you said. And as far as I know, neither does FDB. All of these things are to the good. But as I said, FDB's "obsession" has large material ramifications for society, because the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
> the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
Actually, I'd say it does both.
I think Freddie has a point insofar as we are sometimes asking the impossible of the education system.
I agree about FDB, reading that question killed me, and Matt's response was no picnic either.
It's obvious to me why Freddie spends so much time on relative attainment: almost all educational research and policy is driven by the idea that it will increase social mobility.