The distribution of war powers, and other things like the Second Amendment, make a lot more sense once you assume that the Constitution doesn't contemplate a standing army.
The president tells the troops where to go, but there are only troops when Congress says there are.
To rein in presidential war powers, I propose that the impeachment removal threshold be lowered from 2/3s of the Senate to a simple majority. This would solve the problem of rouge presidents in general. The impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Trump would both have resulted in removals and we would have been better off if they had.
Matt, you mention possibly getting to talk to McDuffie soon. I wouldn’t expect a SB candidate forum, but I would appreciate if you could sniff out Goodweather too. Seems unlikely than anyone other than McDuffie or JLG has a chance regardless.
I lived for years in the Forest Hills neighborhood of DC, close to the Van Ness UDC Metro station. Because of the station name, most people didn’t know where Forest Hills was. I was close enough to Cleveland Park that I just told people I lived there. Given that Cleveland Park benefits from sharing a name with the Red Line stop, everyone knew where that was.
I live in Iowa. The farm vote is overrated and the blue collar manufacturing vote is underrated. There is a big layoff in the news at Amana Whirlpool. Most of the jobs are going to Mexico. You look at the areas Trump won vs Obama and it’s all heavier manufacturing counties (Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque). There is a lot of opportunity for Democrats because unlike Texas, Republicans in Iowa have done a poor job attracting new businesses and Iowa’s economy is in a recession. I think Rob Sand has a good chance of winning the governor race. But I think Ashley Hinson will win if Zach Wahls wins because I don’t think he is the strongest candidate.
"Anyone who reads Slow Boring can probably guess what I think the takeaway should be."
In the absence of an articulation of that takeaway (which, yes, we all guessed, and is of course defensible), might I suggest an alternative hypothesis of "the agenda is set by propaganda organs, from whom legacy media operations take all their cues about the topics and tone of coverage, and Democrats are just pretty much screwed unless they do something to upset that dynamic."
It still seems like everybody thinks they're going to fix this with "messaging" that nobody is going to hear. Right wing media is close to immutable right now, so I say, start playing the refs in the "liberal" media until they actually act liberal. Dems put zero heat on them.
Read the wikipedia page of the Herero genocide. One of the guys involved with running concentration camps in Namibia would go on to become an influential Nazi eugenist. Reading stuff like this really puts into context the classic post colonial response of "Sounds like a great idea" to the question of "What do you think about Western Civilization."
Respectfully I think your Metro Map is worse than what theyve built. The splits and combines you lament may be annoying for through commuters, but they add a fair amount of convenience than a more pure spoke model would add in - theres a lot of utility to a metro line near your house that does more than just take you downtown. In my untrained mind, this is an advantage of the Metro over the L, whom I really wished completed the Circle Line on the near north side back 15-20 years ago (along with all the BRTs that keep getting blocked by NIMBYs)
The problem with splits and combines is that they reduce frequency of *any* train on the branches. If your signaling can handle up to one train every 4 minutes, but there’s a tiny segment that shares three lines, then each of those lines can only come once every 12 minutes.
The El has a problem that everything is radial, so you don’t have any good connections around the grid. But it’s better to have a bunch of relatively parallel lines on a grid, rather than having some of them share any tracks, because those shared tracks make all of those lines much less useful along the rest of their length.
I take the point about how Metro should’ve been more focused in its core trunks and should’ve been paired with MARC/VRE upgrades but I find it funny that Matt’s preferred Metro map still parallels VRE from Crystal City to Alexandria. I’d have had it go down Columbia Pike instead!
With Maine and SC moving rapidly Dem, the Dems just need to win two of Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, or Texas. That is very doable despite the fact people think Dems are too woke. Trump isn't going to wake up tomorrow and start reversing course on his unpopular policies. He will continue to do them right up until November.
Yes, NC. Dems are basically even in Texas and have a good shot at Ohio with Brown. Alaska is a wild card. The prediction markets are wildly underestimating Dem chances.
Where did you see the “basically even in Texas”? That would be interesting if true! (Back in 2008 I made a bet with a friend that Texas would elect a Democratic Senator by 2028, but I’ve been less optimistic about that bet in recent years.)
If you just have one poll that is within the margin of error, it's reasonable to treat it as close to 50% probability. But if you've got several polls that are each individually within the margin of error, but all on the same side, that gives you stronger evidence. It looks like there are at least three polls of every pairwise matchup of a Democrat and a Republican, and there is one Republican such that one of those three is a tie with each Democrat, but all the other polls favor the Republican (though most of them are only by a few points). That gives a strong indication to me that the Republican is leading by a few points.
The DC Metro was designed as a hub-and-spoke system to move people from the suburbs and outer neighborhoods into downtown and then back out again, rather than as a true intercity subway. Matt notes that Metro overlaps with commuter rail, but this is actually backward: at the time Metro was conceptualized and designed in the 1960s, local passenger rail in the DC area was on its deathbed and the MARC and VRE commuter rail systems were only created later in the 1980s and 1990s.
Metro's hub-and-spoke layout is also why I dislike the gradual move of government agencies and associated private sector firms from downtown DC to the Beltway fringes like Springfield or Greenbelt, since the local mass transit system is not designed to support commuter movement out to the periphery and (in my opinion) negatively results in greater traffic.
"It wasn’t bad math; it was a political decision. For some reason the Soviet whale fleet had clout with the relevant decision-makers, so it kept on killing until eventually the politics flipped."
This isn't really an argument against a centrally-planned economy, it's an argument against letting politicians (or perhaps any humans) do the planning. The ability to plan fully and correctly without the irrationality and self-service humans introduce into the process would be the great contribution of AI.
"Anyone who reads Slow Boring can probably guess what I think the takeaway should be, but I don’t want to start any arguments so much as to platform the observation."
What a strange thing for Matt to say. Isn't the whole point of Slow Boring that Matt shares his opinion and starts arguments? And frankly I read SB most days and I'm not sure what Matt is trying to get at. If you want to say something make a post about it!
The distribution of war powers, and other things like the Second Amendment, make a lot more sense once you assume that the Constitution doesn't contemplate a standing army.
The president tells the troops where to go, but there are only troops when Congress says there are.
To rein in presidential war powers, I propose that the impeachment removal threshold be lowered from 2/3s of the Senate to a simple majority. This would solve the problem of rouge presidents in general. The impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Trump would both have resulted in removals and we would have been better off if they had.
Matt, you mention possibly getting to talk to McDuffie soon. I wouldn’t expect a SB candidate forum, but I would appreciate if you could sniff out Goodweather too. Seems unlikely than anyone other than McDuffie or JLG has a chance regardless.
Alon Levy has a good plan for how to rejig the DC Metro to rationalize the lines a bit.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/06/18/how-washington-should-spend-10-billion/
I lived for years in the Forest Hills neighborhood of DC, close to the Van Ness UDC Metro station. Because of the station name, most people didn’t know where Forest Hills was. I was close enough to Cleveland Park that I just told people I lived there. Given that Cleveland Park benefits from sharing a name with the Red Line stop, everyone knew where that was.
I live in Iowa. The farm vote is overrated and the blue collar manufacturing vote is underrated. There is a big layoff in the news at Amana Whirlpool. Most of the jobs are going to Mexico. You look at the areas Trump won vs Obama and it’s all heavier manufacturing counties (Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque). There is a lot of opportunity for Democrats because unlike Texas, Republicans in Iowa have done a poor job attracting new businesses and Iowa’s economy is in a recession. I think Rob Sand has a good chance of winning the governor race. But I think Ashley Hinson will win if Zach Wahls wins because I don’t think he is the strongest candidate.
"Anyone who reads Slow Boring can probably guess what I think the takeaway should be."
In the absence of an articulation of that takeaway (which, yes, we all guessed, and is of course defensible), might I suggest an alternative hypothesis of "the agenda is set by propaganda organs, from whom legacy media operations take all their cues about the topics and tone of coverage, and Democrats are just pretty much screwed unless they do something to upset that dynamic."
It still seems like everybody thinks they're going to fix this with "messaging" that nobody is going to hear. Right wing media is close to immutable right now, so I say, start playing the refs in the "liberal" media until they actually act liberal. Dems put zero heat on them.
why is matt trying to spike the price of liver on twitter? hasn't the hipsterization of tripe and oxtail done enough damage?
Read the wikipedia page of the Herero genocide. One of the guys involved with running concentration camps in Namibia would go on to become an influential Nazi eugenist. Reading stuff like this really puts into context the classic post colonial response of "Sounds like a great idea" to the question of "What do you think about Western Civilization."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Fischer
Respectfully I think your Metro Map is worse than what theyve built. The splits and combines you lament may be annoying for through commuters, but they add a fair amount of convenience than a more pure spoke model would add in - theres a lot of utility to a metro line near your house that does more than just take you downtown. In my untrained mind, this is an advantage of the Metro over the L, whom I really wished completed the Circle Line on the near north side back 15-20 years ago (along with all the BRTs that keep getting blocked by NIMBYs)
The problem with splits and combines is that they reduce frequency of *any* train on the branches. If your signaling can handle up to one train every 4 minutes, but there’s a tiny segment that shares three lines, then each of those lines can only come once every 12 minutes.
The El has a problem that everything is radial, so you don’t have any good connections around the grid. But it’s better to have a bunch of relatively parallel lines on a grid, rather than having some of them share any tracks, because those shared tracks make all of those lines much less useful along the rest of their length.
Thanks, good explanation
I take the point about how Metro should’ve been more focused in its core trunks and should’ve been paired with MARC/VRE upgrades but I find it funny that Matt’s preferred Metro map still parallels VRE from Crystal City to Alexandria. I’d have had it go down Columbia Pike instead!
With Maine and SC moving rapidly Dem, the Dems just need to win two of Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, or Texas. That is very doable despite the fact people think Dems are too woke. Trump isn't going to wake up tomorrow and start reversing course on his unpopular policies. He will continue to do them right up until November.
I assume you mean NC rather than SC? In any case, it does sound a bit tough to win two of those five states!
Yes, NC. Dems are basically even in Texas and have a good shot at Ohio with Brown. Alaska is a wild card. The prediction markets are wildly underestimating Dem chances.
Where did you see the “basically even in Texas”? That would be interesting if true! (Back in 2008 I made a bet with a friend that Texas would elect a Democratic Senator by 2028, but I’ve been less optimistic about that bet in recent years.)
https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-polls/texas
A lot of these polls with hypothetical matchups show the race within the margin of error.
If you just have one poll that is within the margin of error, it's reasonable to treat it as close to 50% probability. But if you've got several polls that are each individually within the margin of error, but all on the same side, that gives you stronger evidence. It looks like there are at least three polls of every pairwise matchup of a Democrat and a Republican, and there is one Republican such that one of those three is a tie with each Democrat, but all the other polls favor the Republican (though most of them are only by a few points). That gives a strong indication to me that the Republican is leading by a few points.
But close enough to say it is entirely winnable if the Dems pick the right candidate.
The DC Metro was designed as a hub-and-spoke system to move people from the suburbs and outer neighborhoods into downtown and then back out again, rather than as a true intercity subway. Matt notes that Metro overlaps with commuter rail, but this is actually backward: at the time Metro was conceptualized and designed in the 1960s, local passenger rail in the DC area was on its deathbed and the MARC and VRE commuter rail systems were only created later in the 1980s and 1990s.
Metro's hub-and-spoke layout is also why I dislike the gradual move of government agencies and associated private sector firms from downtown DC to the Beltway fringes like Springfield or Greenbelt, since the local mass transit system is not designed to support commuter movement out to the periphery and (in my opinion) negatively results in greater traffic.
TIL "returning citizens" and I'm just so sick of it all.
If your plan is so bad that you have to use language designed to obfuscate what you're doing, maybe don't do it.
Jeffrey Epstein, returned citizen, 2009.
"It wasn’t bad math; it was a political decision. For some reason the Soviet whale fleet had clout with the relevant decision-makers, so it kept on killing until eventually the politics flipped."
This isn't really an argument against a centrally-planned economy, it's an argument against letting politicians (or perhaps any humans) do the planning. The ability to plan fully and correctly without the irrationality and self-service humans introduce into the process would be the great contribution of AI.
"Anyone who reads Slow Boring can probably guess what I think the takeaway should be, but I don’t want to start any arguments so much as to platform the observation."
What a strange thing for Matt to say. Isn't the whole point of Slow Boring that Matt shares his opinion and starts arguments? And frankly I read SB most days and I'm not sure what Matt is trying to get at. If you want to say something make a post about it!