lindamc mentioned one of Virginia Postrel's books. She has a recent podcast with Charles C. Mann called "Everyday Abundance: The hidden stories behind everyday technologies." Highly recommended.
I look forward to Troy Jackson continuing his personal legacy of defending American workers against illegal, low wage scabs imported by greedy businesses and corrupt politicians.
It means that Troy Jackson's first time in the spotlight was fighting against illegal immigrant workers coming across the border to undercut the locals, and I hope he still cares about this issue, as leftist labor and political leaders such as Caesar Chavez and Bernie Sanders used to.
Yes and Caesar Chavez and Bernie Sanders were full of shite; it is good for everyone if hard-working people show up on time for less pay, possibly pay into SS and do stuff that American citizens benefit from. These days though, who are these illegals actually competing with? Meth heads?
No hand-outs for losers, cheap labor is good for everyone.
That labor is only cheap because the illegal workers and their employers are cheating. If you're fine with tax and welfare fraud and no enforcement of worker safety laws, we can start at home, we don't need to import foreigners to make it happen. We have plenty of hard working people here who simply want to be paid a good wage, and employers only look outside America because they don't want to pay a reasonable rate. If there's a labor shortage, allow wages to rise or labor saving innovation to take place.
I feel like Matt is feeling his way toward a synthesis on the moderate-leftist question.
There are a few positions that are out of bounds - defund the police, cancel Thanksgiving, abolish the Senate, etc.
There's room for more-left politicians in places where they can win. I don't think Mamdani could win where I am, in Ohio, but I wish him well.
The activist base needs to chill on certain things. Whether we "abolish" ICE or "roll back" ICE, something different will happen in this space if we elect a Dem.
Moderation alone doesn't do it. A politician needs to stand for something. Trump moderated on a bunch of things, but he's not a "moderate." A candidate needs to have some juice apart from their policy positions.
We can move the needle on certain things. Rolling back ICE was not a winner two years ago, but I think it is now, and that's thanks to the good people of Minnesota.
All that needs to happen is that immigration law gets implemented *in accordance with* existing immigration law. That would include disciplining/firing/prosecuting officers who use unnecessary force. I don't think existing law makes detainment centers necessary. The unrealistic arrest and deportation quotas need to go as well.
But how do you put that into a campaign slogan? Roll back ICE sounds okay to me.
Re: looksmaxxing, I feel like there's a dynamic where no one *has* to find a partner. The old stereotype of "when are you going to give me grandbabies?" has lessened. There are plenty of other options for spending your time. So a lot of people just aren't getting it done.
I think this leads women to get a little more choosy. I think men are getting really lazy ... right up until the point where they freak out and start hitting their faces with hammers.
"How do I find a partner?" has always been a question without a clear answer. But it seems harder these days.
To me it's just kind of funny that men worry about "looksmaxxing" when the male gaze could determine many women's' futures until the last few decades in liberal countries, where yes, no one *has* to find a partner anymore.
I think it's only fair that men should look "pretty" for women too.
And I practice what I preach (though I am a chopped and unc dad pushing 50) as I have been dieting and working out 5 times a week for a few years now. Though I would never do the looksmaxxing stuff as it would be unbecoming for a GenXer.
And I think just innately, women don't value physical attractiveness as much as other character-based traits - how fun a guy is, how easy it is to get along with him/talk to him, how safe she feels around him. Whereas men like boobs.
Let me add my voice to those who are criticizing Matt Y for epically missing the point on the ICE question: the point is not "silly Resist Libs think replacing ICE with FIRE will solve all our immigration problems lol;" the point is that people object to the cruelty, viciousness and unaccountability of ICE in the Trump and Scheiss-sturmfuehrer* Miller era. Two U.S. citizens shot dead in the street without so much as an apology or "how unfortunate, we'll get to the bottom of this and make sure this doesn't happen again." Shitty conditions in ICE detention facilities, with inadequate food and water and no medical care until inmates need to be hospitalized (having been a pregnant woman myself, I'm particularly enraged by reports of pregnant women in ICE detention being denied care). Immigrants who try to do the right thing, applying for a change of status, showing up to check-ins, being shackled and hustled off to a detention facility, and their families left to wonder what's going on. People deported to "third-party" countries they weren't born in and have no connection to. The immigrant man shot and killed in Houston on his way to work, and ICE lying about drugs in his truck (he had white powder in his truck, which turned out to be electrolytes). "Kavanaugh stops" that allow ICE agents to stop people for the crime of existing in public while looking or sounding Hispanic. Etc.
What's the solution? I don't know what the exact right thing to do is re: ICE. You Don't Gotta Hand It to the Orange Man Ever, but I actually thought the Remain in Mexico policy had the makings of a good idea if tweaked a bit. As I said before: the next POTUS should sit down with President Sheinbaum of Mexico and come to an agreement, whereby asylum seekers from South and Central America get resettled in Mexico (the nice parts, not the drug gang-populated parts) and the U.S. pays Mexico to help settle the asylum seekers and integrate them into the local community instead of herding them into squalid refugee camps. We could seek similar agreements with other Latin American countries that meet the criteria of "I can probably find a job" + "the place isn't a lawless wasteland of drug gangs" + "the government won't kill me or imprison me for being [member of disliked minority group]."
My take on asylum seekers: they deserve help and compassion, but they also can't be picky about where they end up, as long as the resettlement solves their original reason for seeking asylum (e.g., "local gangs threatened my son with death unless he agreed to join them back in Guatemala, but that won't be a problem in Oaxaca.")
*stolen from a brilliant but unnamed commentator on the LGM blog
Was W's economics beyter than Biden's? The Great Woke Inflation seems to be less of a problem than the Great Recession, which itself was preceded by a manufacturing decline, and led to large unemployment, communities that saw their economies greatly disrupted after generations or centuries, and this was a rather widespread thing during W's time. Biden was a bad president, but…I dont think he was worse than W, inflation sucks but there WAS growth in american manufacturing in his four years.
People forget that the post-COVID recovery in the US was much faster than in other places, and that there is generally a tradeoff between inflation and economic growth.
Fair. Perhaps he did the best possible with the economy, and with Afghanistan, and maybe with immigration. But he did lose re election and maybe his debate and decisions are separate from his presidency but nevertheless beating Trump should have been his priority, and not doing so was bad.
But there are levels of bad, and Biden's economy felt much better than Ws.
Well, Bush actively blocked state level regulations of sub-prime mortgages, and had the SEC stop monitoring mortgages. The China Shock that weakened US manufacturing also happened completely on his watch, and his tax cuts favored capital gains that flowed into real estate speculation, rather than favoring investment in domestic manufacturing.
He definitely deserves a large share of the blame for the Great Recession.
Oh and of course his tax cuts also took a budget surplus and made it a long yerm deficit that has basically been with us for the last 25 years. I think parts of it were reduced in the fiscal cliff deals of like 2014, but then...well, more tax cuts and more tax cuts under two Trump admins. The latter two aren't his fault but...yea the current fiscal crisis is also partly on him.
Here's my insider-outsider take as someone who grew up in Maine but no longer lives there (i.e. this is primarily based on vibes from my Facebook feed):
Platner was an insurgent. The party did not want him. Mainers are especially skeptical of political parties.
Jackson was hand-picked by the party. Keeping the platform exactly the same just reminds voters that politicians lie and don't always do what they say. If only they had remembered that in the 2024 election.
So much of the data center backlash seems like an own-goal. I work for a company that develops renewable projects in rural areas and face a lot of backlash. Some is NIMBYism, some is genuine concerns, construction can increase traffic and kick up debris, some is a resentment of the feeling that others see their land as only valuable if it's generating power for the "useful" people in the cities.
But we take the opposite tack of the hyperscalers, who have city councils sign NDAs. We try to send leadership to meet with community leaders, hold big press conferences where we tout the benefits, present oversized checks to school districts and fire departments, etc. We have slick materials that address the concerns about plants head-on. Obviously this stuff all costs money and slows our development, but addressing political concerns is a reality of doing business in a democracy. Clearly there are places where the political process can be more streamlined and Matt and others have written at length about them, but I think these hyperscalers thought they could just opt out of politics and are in for a rude awakening.
We will see. People like having lower taxes and energy bills, and if data centers can pay taxes and contribute to energy infrastructure that lowers bills that feels like a broad win-win that benefits everyone rather than a few stationary bandits. If AI is going to be even 10% of what people are estimating the hyperscalers will have plenty of money to pay for this. But they will have to make this case to voters that it can be a win-win rather than try to end-run the political process with NDAs.
Platner v/s Jackson: I think the missing piece is an absolutely critical one that wonkish types underrate all the time, and can be summed up in one word -- charisma. Platner has it, for all his flaws. Jackson doesn't. You can't define it but you know it when you see it.
About data centers: a pause to determine appropriate regulation around electricity & water use and noise would be wise. But at its root, opposition to data centers is not really about any of these things. Data centers have, in my opinion, become synecdoche, they stand in for people's general discomfort with AI and are one thing the average person feels like they might be able to control. The average person can't stop Silicon Valley from developing a technology that the CEOs themselves insist is going to destroy everyone's jobs and perhaps the world; they can't stop their own bosses from forcing it on them; but they can yell at their city council members and block a data center.
A pause is not going to address any of these deeper concerns unless we/our elected leaders/tech CEOs take them seriously and address them intentionally.
For me the data center synecdoche is pretty broad and goes beyond AI: it encompasses concern over global warming since suddenly we're back to using *more* electricity and therefore more fossil fuels along with increasing water shortages and drought conditions and the apparent unlimited power of Silicon Valley to pretty much do whatever they want.
Wow. And triple wow. How can you be so tone deaf? Abolishing ICE, for me, is not about the granular details of either partisan politics or the finer points of who gets to immigrate and who doesn't in some future/fantasy administration. Under this administration, ICE, in policy and practice, is cruel and lawless. Do I really need to go into all the documented details of that statement? ICE should be abolished because it has been irredeemably poisoned and corrupted. NONE of the agents who have been involved in invading and terrorizing our cities, operating "detention" centers, kidnapping and deporting people to 3rd-country gulags, or providing intimidation services to further the whims of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump should be brought into any future iteration of immigration enforcement. Would you have wanted William Calley and his squad to be welcomed back into the US Army after the My Lai massacre?
No, I don't think a new administration could pull off that kind of ICE abolition. But that is beside the point. The cynical perspective--that the topic shouldn't even be broached because it can't be done--is itself a product of a mindless, amoral to immoral political system.
I agree that wild-eyed sloganeering is a cheap, dangerous, and ineffective strategy. At least some of the sloganeering activists are fueled only by frustration and outrage, devoid of a deep understanding of history or self-insight.
I’m a bit surprised how tin-eared Matt came across about how democrats should address the immigration question when in power. Especially when compared to his receptive answer to voters’ concerns just a few paragraphs above.
His point is correct that you are window dressing to some extent what you call ice and where it goes (assuming no abolishment) but there’s the rather obvious but unaddressed point about their behaviors and patterns of enforcement; accountability for abuses; and what to do about their multi-hundred-billion dollar budget.
Maybe I’m just a little sensitive on the topic and want to read answers that weren’t exactly asked but it did seem lacking.
My guess on why Platner was popular was that he entered politics from a life lived without being careful about things that politicians are overly careful about. And it was a breath of fresh air until it wasn't.
Yep. He had a train of increasingly worse lines that subsets of people were decreasingly willing to cross. At the beginning, the transgressiveness worked in his favor.
"By inventing a new economically useful thing to do with electricity, the frontier labs have sort of scrambled all these plans and left the climate groups kind of glitching out in terms of what to say about it. "
Which is odd because we know what to do and have since day 1 -- a revenue nuetral carbon tax. Despite the fact that such a tax would literally replace a tax on something good (income) with a tax on something everyone agrees is at least a little bad (emissions) literally no one, not even the Europeans or Canadians seems to care enough to implement a carbon tax even close to the needed level.
I really don't get it. Unless it's just love of central planning why would you favor a strategy with really significant regulatory losses (energy standards CAFE etc) over just increasing carbon taxes (and cutting income/VAT taxes) until you get what you want.
--
Ok I take that back. I do get it. I think the left feels revenue nuetral carbon taxes have too conservative a vibe and allow people to purchase the right to hurt the environment (they see as sacred) and talking up the income tax cuts to attract the right would make it worse.
Your last paragraph hits the mark. We had a good example of this in Washington State, where a revenue-neutral carbon tax went to ballot measure and several environment groups endorsed *against* it. They didn't want revenue-neutral, they wanted a different measure that would put the money into a fund instead. So they told people to vote it down and vote yes on the next one, the measure lost, the revenue-positive one came out the following year, and it, too, lost. Finally, years later, our legislature enacted the present cap-and-invest, and conservative groups continue to try and repeal it to this day.
More generally, there seems to be a *deep* distrust about revenue neutrality among voters. Anyone I have ever talked to believes that any such "shift" would simply keep the tax-raising half and drop the tax-lowering part. That's a big hurdle to overcome.
I think the problem is that offsetting sales taxes with revenue from a carbon tax produces no big winners; the benefits are diffused across the entire population. The Washington cap and trade system, in contrast, uses the revenue raised from selling emission offsets to narrowly fund environmental programs, which has created several constituencies that are strongly in favor of the program (environmental groups, the tribes, etc.) who came out and lobbied for the proposal and fought back efforts to repeal it.
What about the environmentalists? Stopping global warming is one of their principle concerns. I don't understand how funding other environmental projects is a big win for them but not cutting carbon emissions.
I agree you may be right that it may not feel like a big win for some reason but at a policy level it seems it is a bigger win than whatever else they might find.
I don’t think global warming has ever been what man environmentalists were deeply passionate about. Take the Sierra Club’s website as an example. Looking today at their main page, there is some mention of closing coal plants and green technology, but the words “global warming” and “climate change” basically appear nowhere. What is highlighted? Protection of trails, rivers, and public lands. The endangered species act. Attempts to end logging. Climate of course has a tab elsewhere on the site, but conservation is what stirs the heart, at least now.
You also have the environmental engineering companies who are responsible for actually replacing culverts or remediating soil erosion. They are environmentalists, but they have no financial stake in addressing climate change. They have a bottom line they need to address, and if a piece of legislation isn’t going to help them get contracts, it’s not worth their time to lobby for.
Some governments (several US states, many(?) Canadian provinces) do have a cap and trade system on CO2 emissions which is a good enough approximation of a carbon tax, even if the structure seems needlessly convoluted. I’m not sure why cap and trade has been easier for the (almost entirely) left and center left wing governments to swallow. Maybe it’s just the historical success of the program for addressing acid rain/NOx and SOx emissions?
The big example is the European ETS -- Canada tried a carbon tax but set the tax rate really damn low --and CA half-assed a cap and trade system.
The primary issue with cap and trade is the rule setting the cap usually target revenue so the revenue is pretty unpredictable. Even if you make massive gains in efficency a carbon tax might collect a few percentage less but you might generate almost no revenue with cap and trade. This means you can't offset other taxes with it so unlike a carbon tax it is a huge net extra tax.
Second, fear of harm to exports and the pressure to reward feel good environmental projects results in a bunch of permits being handed out to national champions and other politically powerful groups or for offsets that don't really have impact. That also makes the revenue even less predictable. Obviously these concerns can also occur with a tax to a degree but it seems harder to legislate a tax cut than to hand out a permit. Also for VAT countries they already have a system to refund VAT on exports they could use with a carbon tax -- harder to do with cap and trade.
But realistically these are all downstream of the first point.
Very worthwhile read on data centers: https://vishwanathank.substack.com/p/the-inevitable-obsolescence-of-the?r=2dal4d&utm_medium=ios
Not impressed with the specificity of the comments.
Especially this one!
lindamc mentioned one of Virginia Postrel's books. She has a recent podcast with Charles C. Mann called "Everyday Abundance: The hidden stories behind everyday technologies." Highly recommended.
I look forward to Troy Jackson continuing his personal legacy of defending American workers against illegal, low wage scabs imported by greedy businesses and corrupt politicians.
Whatever the hell that means.
It means that Troy Jackson's first time in the spotlight was fighting against illegal immigrant workers coming across the border to undercut the locals, and I hope he still cares about this issue, as leftist labor and political leaders such as Caesar Chavez and Bernie Sanders used to.
Yes and Caesar Chavez and Bernie Sanders were full of shite; it is good for everyone if hard-working people show up on time for less pay, possibly pay into SS and do stuff that American citizens benefit from. These days though, who are these illegals actually competing with? Meth heads?
No hand-outs for losers, cheap labor is good for everyone.
That labor is only cheap because the illegal workers and their employers are cheating. If you're fine with tax and welfare fraud and no enforcement of worker safety laws, we can start at home, we don't need to import foreigners to make it happen. We have plenty of hard working people here who simply want to be paid a good wage, and employers only look outside America because they don't want to pay a reasonable rate. If there's a labor shortage, allow wages to rise or labor saving innovation to take place.
I feel like Matt is feeling his way toward a synthesis on the moderate-leftist question.
There are a few positions that are out of bounds - defund the police, cancel Thanksgiving, abolish the Senate, etc.
There's room for more-left politicians in places where they can win. I don't think Mamdani could win where I am, in Ohio, but I wish him well.
The activist base needs to chill on certain things. Whether we "abolish" ICE or "roll back" ICE, something different will happen in this space if we elect a Dem.
Moderation alone doesn't do it. A politician needs to stand for something. Trump moderated on a bunch of things, but he's not a "moderate." A candidate needs to have some juice apart from their policy positions.
We can move the needle on certain things. Rolling back ICE was not a winner two years ago, but I think it is now, and that's thanks to the good people of Minnesota.
All that needs to happen is that immigration law gets implemented *in accordance with* existing immigration law. That would include disciplining/firing/prosecuting officers who use unnecessary force. I don't think existing law makes detainment centers necessary. The unrealistic arrest and deportation quotas need to go as well.
But how do you put that into a campaign slogan? Roll back ICE sounds okay to me.
Re: looksmaxxing, I feel like there's a dynamic where no one *has* to find a partner. The old stereotype of "when are you going to give me grandbabies?" has lessened. There are plenty of other options for spending your time. So a lot of people just aren't getting it done.
I think this leads women to get a little more choosy. I think men are getting really lazy ... right up until the point where they freak out and start hitting their faces with hammers.
"How do I find a partner?" has always been a question without a clear answer. But it seems harder these days.
To me it's just kind of funny that men worry about "looksmaxxing" when the male gaze could determine many women's' futures until the last few decades in liberal countries, where yes, no one *has* to find a partner anymore.
I think it's only fair that men should look "pretty" for women too.
And I practice what I preach (though I am a chopped and unc dad pushing 50) as I have been dieting and working out 5 times a week for a few years now. Though I would never do the looksmaxxing stuff as it would be unbecoming for a GenXer.
And I think just innately, women don't value physical attractiveness as much as other character-based traits - how fun a guy is, how easy it is to get along with him/talk to him, how safe she feels around him. Whereas men like boobs.
Let me add my voice to those who are criticizing Matt Y for epically missing the point on the ICE question: the point is not "silly Resist Libs think replacing ICE with FIRE will solve all our immigration problems lol;" the point is that people object to the cruelty, viciousness and unaccountability of ICE in the Trump and Scheiss-sturmfuehrer* Miller era. Two U.S. citizens shot dead in the street without so much as an apology or "how unfortunate, we'll get to the bottom of this and make sure this doesn't happen again." Shitty conditions in ICE detention facilities, with inadequate food and water and no medical care until inmates need to be hospitalized (having been a pregnant woman myself, I'm particularly enraged by reports of pregnant women in ICE detention being denied care). Immigrants who try to do the right thing, applying for a change of status, showing up to check-ins, being shackled and hustled off to a detention facility, and their families left to wonder what's going on. People deported to "third-party" countries they weren't born in and have no connection to. The immigrant man shot and killed in Houston on his way to work, and ICE lying about drugs in his truck (he had white powder in his truck, which turned out to be electrolytes). "Kavanaugh stops" that allow ICE agents to stop people for the crime of existing in public while looking or sounding Hispanic. Etc.
What's the solution? I don't know what the exact right thing to do is re: ICE. You Don't Gotta Hand It to the Orange Man Ever, but I actually thought the Remain in Mexico policy had the makings of a good idea if tweaked a bit. As I said before: the next POTUS should sit down with President Sheinbaum of Mexico and come to an agreement, whereby asylum seekers from South and Central America get resettled in Mexico (the nice parts, not the drug gang-populated parts) and the U.S. pays Mexico to help settle the asylum seekers and integrate them into the local community instead of herding them into squalid refugee camps. We could seek similar agreements with other Latin American countries that meet the criteria of "I can probably find a job" + "the place isn't a lawless wasteland of drug gangs" + "the government won't kill me or imprison me for being [member of disliked minority group]."
My take on asylum seekers: they deserve help and compassion, but they also can't be picky about where they end up, as long as the resettlement solves their original reason for seeking asylum (e.g., "local gangs threatened my son with death unless he agreed to join them back in Guatemala, but that won't be a problem in Oaxaca.")
*stolen from a brilliant but unnamed commentator on the LGM blog
Was W's economics beyter than Biden's? The Great Woke Inflation seems to be less of a problem than the Great Recession, which itself was preceded by a manufacturing decline, and led to large unemployment, communities that saw their economies greatly disrupted after generations or centuries, and this was a rather widespread thing during W's time. Biden was a bad president, but…I dont think he was worse than W, inflation sucks but there WAS growth in american manufacturing in his four years.
People forget that the post-COVID recovery in the US was much faster than in other places, and that there is generally a tradeoff between inflation and economic growth.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-recovery-from-covid-19-in-international-comparison/
>Biden was a bad president
Alternative hypothesis: There were no ideal policy options.
Fair. Perhaps he did the best possible with the economy, and with Afghanistan, and maybe with immigration. But he did lose re election and maybe his debate and decisions are separate from his presidency but nevertheless beating Trump should have been his priority, and not doing so was bad.
But there are levels of bad, and Biden's economy felt much better than Ws.
Well, Bush actively blocked state level regulations of sub-prime mortgages, and had the SEC stop monitoring mortgages. The China Shock that weakened US manufacturing also happened completely on his watch, and his tax cuts favored capital gains that flowed into real estate speculation, rather than favoring investment in domestic manufacturing.
He definitely deserves a large share of the blame for the Great Recession.
Oh and of course his tax cuts also took a budget surplus and made it a long yerm deficit that has basically been with us for the last 25 years. I think parts of it were reduced in the fiscal cliff deals of like 2014, but then...well, more tax cuts and more tax cuts under two Trump admins. The latter two aren't his fault but...yea the current fiscal crisis is also partly on him.
Here's my insider-outsider take as someone who grew up in Maine but no longer lives there (i.e. this is primarily based on vibes from my Facebook feed):
Platner was an insurgent. The party did not want him. Mainers are especially skeptical of political parties.
Jackson was hand-picked by the party. Keeping the platform exactly the same just reminds voters that politicians lie and don't always do what they say. If only they had remembered that in the 2024 election.
I’ve yet to hear a single person in real life mention data centers. But then I’m also not online (except for here).
My point being that stovepiping in a country of 340 million people can make things seem far more universal than they are.
So much of the data center backlash seems like an own-goal. I work for a company that develops renewable projects in rural areas and face a lot of backlash. Some is NIMBYism, some is genuine concerns, construction can increase traffic and kick up debris, some is a resentment of the feeling that others see their land as only valuable if it's generating power for the "useful" people in the cities.
But we take the opposite tack of the hyperscalers, who have city councils sign NDAs. We try to send leadership to meet with community leaders, hold big press conferences where we tout the benefits, present oversized checks to school districts and fire departments, etc. We have slick materials that address the concerns about plants head-on. Obviously this stuff all costs money and slows our development, but addressing political concerns is a reality of doing business in a democracy. Clearly there are places where the political process can be more streamlined and Matt and others have written at length about them, but I think these hyperscalers thought they could just opt out of politics and are in for a rude awakening.
+1, though I'm not exactly happy about it. Apart from tackling a small set of legitimate concerns, it will quickly devolve into stationary banditry.
We will see. People like having lower taxes and energy bills, and if data centers can pay taxes and contribute to energy infrastructure that lowers bills that feels like a broad win-win that benefits everyone rather than a few stationary bandits. If AI is going to be even 10% of what people are estimating the hyperscalers will have plenty of money to pay for this. But they will have to make this case to voters that it can be a win-win rather than try to end-run the political process with NDAs.
Platner v/s Jackson: I think the missing piece is an absolutely critical one that wonkish types underrate all the time, and can be summed up in one word -- charisma. Platner has it, for all his flaws. Jackson doesn't. You can't define it but you know it when you see it.
About data centers: a pause to determine appropriate regulation around electricity & water use and noise would be wise. But at its root, opposition to data centers is not really about any of these things. Data centers have, in my opinion, become synecdoche, they stand in for people's general discomfort with AI and are one thing the average person feels like they might be able to control. The average person can't stop Silicon Valley from developing a technology that the CEOs themselves insist is going to destroy everyone's jobs and perhaps the world; they can't stop their own bosses from forcing it on them; but they can yell at their city council members and block a data center.
A pause is not going to address any of these deeper concerns unless we/our elected leaders/tech CEOs take them seriously and address them intentionally.
For me the data center synecdoche is pretty broad and goes beyond AI: it encompasses concern over global warming since suddenly we're back to using *more* electricity and therefore more fossil fuels along with increasing water shortages and drought conditions and the apparent unlimited power of Silicon Valley to pretty much do whatever they want.
Wow. And triple wow. How can you be so tone deaf? Abolishing ICE, for me, is not about the granular details of either partisan politics or the finer points of who gets to immigrate and who doesn't in some future/fantasy administration. Under this administration, ICE, in policy and practice, is cruel and lawless. Do I really need to go into all the documented details of that statement? ICE should be abolished because it has been irredeemably poisoned and corrupted. NONE of the agents who have been involved in invading and terrorizing our cities, operating "detention" centers, kidnapping and deporting people to 3rd-country gulags, or providing intimidation services to further the whims of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump should be brought into any future iteration of immigration enforcement. Would you have wanted William Calley and his squad to be welcomed back into the US Army after the My Lai massacre?
No, I don't think a new administration could pull off that kind of ICE abolition. But that is beside the point. The cynical perspective--that the topic shouldn't even be broached because it can't be done--is itself a product of a mindless, amoral to immoral political system.
I agree that wild-eyed sloganeering is a cheap, dangerous, and ineffective strategy. At least some of the sloganeering activists are fueled only by frustration and outrage, devoid of a deep understanding of history or self-insight.
I’m a bit surprised how tin-eared Matt came across about how democrats should address the immigration question when in power. Especially when compared to his receptive answer to voters’ concerns just a few paragraphs above.
His point is correct that you are window dressing to some extent what you call ice and where it goes (assuming no abolishment) but there’s the rather obvious but unaddressed point about their behaviors and patterns of enforcement; accountability for abuses; and what to do about their multi-hundred-billion dollar budget.
Maybe I’m just a little sensitive on the topic and want to read answers that weren’t exactly asked but it did seem lacking.
My guess on why Platner was popular was that he entered politics from a life lived without being careful about things that politicians are overly careful about. And it was a breath of fresh air until it wasn't.
It’s all fun and games until you learn your fun outsider candidate committed rape.
Yep. He had a train of increasingly worse lines that subsets of people were decreasingly willing to cross. At the beginning, the transgressiveness worked in his favor.
"By inventing a new economically useful thing to do with electricity, the frontier labs have sort of scrambled all these plans and left the climate groups kind of glitching out in terms of what to say about it. "
Which is odd because we know what to do and have since day 1 -- a revenue nuetral carbon tax. Despite the fact that such a tax would literally replace a tax on something good (income) with a tax on something everyone agrees is at least a little bad (emissions) literally no one, not even the Europeans or Canadians seems to care enough to implement a carbon tax even close to the needed level.
I really don't get it. Unless it's just love of central planning why would you favor a strategy with really significant regulatory losses (energy standards CAFE etc) over just increasing carbon taxes (and cutting income/VAT taxes) until you get what you want.
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Ok I take that back. I do get it. I think the left feels revenue nuetral carbon taxes have too conservative a vibe and allow people to purchase the right to hurt the environment (they see as sacred) and talking up the income tax cuts to attract the right would make it worse.
Your last paragraph hits the mark. We had a good example of this in Washington State, where a revenue-neutral carbon tax went to ballot measure and several environment groups endorsed *against* it. They didn't want revenue-neutral, they wanted a different measure that would put the money into a fund instead. So they told people to vote it down and vote yes on the next one, the measure lost, the revenue-positive one came out the following year, and it, too, lost. Finally, years later, our legislature enacted the present cap-and-invest, and conservative groups continue to try and repeal it to this day.
More generally, there seems to be a *deep* distrust about revenue neutrality among voters. Anyone I have ever talked to believes that any such "shift" would simply keep the tax-raising half and drop the tax-lowering part. That's a big hurdle to overcome.
I think the problem is that offsetting sales taxes with revenue from a carbon tax produces no big winners; the benefits are diffused across the entire population. The Washington cap and trade system, in contrast, uses the revenue raised from selling emission offsets to narrowly fund environmental programs, which has created several constituencies that are strongly in favor of the program (environmental groups, the tribes, etc.) who came out and lobbied for the proposal and fought back efforts to repeal it.
What about the environmentalists? Stopping global warming is one of their principle concerns. I don't understand how funding other environmental projects is a big win for them but not cutting carbon emissions.
I agree you may be right that it may not feel like a big win for some reason but at a policy level it seems it is a bigger win than whatever else they might find.
I don’t think global warming has ever been what man environmentalists were deeply passionate about. Take the Sierra Club’s website as an example. Looking today at their main page, there is some mention of closing coal plants and green technology, but the words “global warming” and “climate change” basically appear nowhere. What is highlighted? Protection of trails, rivers, and public lands. The endangered species act. Attempts to end logging. Climate of course has a tab elsewhere on the site, but conservation is what stirs the heart, at least now.
You also have the environmental engineering companies who are responsible for actually replacing culverts or remediating soil erosion. They are environmentalists, but they have no financial stake in addressing climate change. They have a bottom line they need to address, and if a piece of legislation isn’t going to help them get contracts, it’s not worth their time to lobby for.
Some governments (several US states, many(?) Canadian provinces) do have a cap and trade system on CO2 emissions which is a good enough approximation of a carbon tax, even if the structure seems needlessly convoluted. I’m not sure why cap and trade has been easier for the (almost entirely) left and center left wing governments to swallow. Maybe it’s just the historical success of the program for addressing acid rain/NOx and SOx emissions?
The big example is the European ETS -- Canada tried a carbon tax but set the tax rate really damn low --and CA half-assed a cap and trade system.
The primary issue with cap and trade is the rule setting the cap usually target revenue so the revenue is pretty unpredictable. Even if you make massive gains in efficency a carbon tax might collect a few percentage less but you might generate almost no revenue with cap and trade. This means you can't offset other taxes with it so unlike a carbon tax it is a huge net extra tax.
Second, fear of harm to exports and the pressure to reward feel good environmental projects results in a bunch of permits being handed out to national champions and other politically powerful groups or for offsets that don't really have impact. That also makes the revenue even less predictable. Obviously these concerns can also occur with a tax to a degree but it seems harder to legislate a tax cut than to hand out a permit. Also for VAT countries they already have a system to refund VAT on exports they could use with a carbon tax -- harder to do with cap and trade.
But realistically these are all downstream of the first point.