Bandwidth consumption is not a good proxy for unhealthy relationships to the internet. There are innumerable ways to consume a lot of data that are healthy and even economically productive.
How many hours could I spent reading incendiary articles or 4chan posts in the same bandwidth budget of a 10-minute educational YouTube video in 4K?
Yeah, this is totally unworkable. Two other big problems: using the internet for work is quite common these days and things like video calls use a lot of bandwidth. Also, movie streaming and television for lots of people is delivered over the internet instead of being separate as it was when people had cable for everything.
The correct approach is to ban targeted advertising. No one likes it, it's clearly permissible as a law, and it would devastate the relevant companies.
As an experiment I just looked at the first 10 ads I got in my Instagram stories. Of them, I think 2 were for brands that I would consider buying from, maybe 2 more where I understand where they were coming from with targeting me.
Ah, good idea! I just tried it and only saw 3 from brands/products I'd consider buying from (out of 10), but all except one of the rest were understandable.
Given those numbers, you won't be surprised that I made several purchases over the last six months, so you can blame me for all of this!
Personally, it's just a very large improvement over the weak targeted ads I've seen prior (me reading the New Yorker circa 2005: "lol they think I'm going to buy a Cartier watch, lol".)
Having said that, I'm not trying to represent myself as typical, just adding a data point. Furthermore, I agree it's spooky when ads follow you around the Internet.
I do sometimes find Instagram ads to be well targeted. But not that much more than eg magazine ads were in the 2000s. What I think people dislike most is when ads seem to know too much about them, or when you visit one site and then they follow you around the internet.
During our last visit to my in-laws, we used their pool table a bit. I swear I did nothing online to suggest we had. I didn't Google anything about it. But suddenly YouTube was suggesting billiards tips videos to me. I bet a ban on that sort of creepiness would be popular.
I’ve had similar experiences and also loathe the creepiness; I am surprised that most people I know don’t seem to care. I also spent a lot of time googling specific lung cancer chemotherapy treatments when my mother was dying - I wanted to get a sense of the efficacy so I was looking for journal articles and the like - and I still get lung cancer ads when my blocker isn’t working well.
Just slap a massive excise tax on social media, so massive that it hugely reduces the profitability of the sector.
Preferably you want to both drive capital out of investing in the sector *and* force it to move to a subscription model that we know very few people will pay for.
Same thing, albeit at a lower level, for video streaming.
A much more plausible government intervention, IMO, is higher taxes on video ads. That's the engine under the infinite scroll. If you make that revenue less profitable, the engineering and product focus will shift to other (hopefully, presumably) less harmful business activities.
Exactly. In practice, a bandwidth tax would be a Netflix and Zoom tax and so this would have minimal effects on text-based social media usage while basically ending the remote work trend as well as create a lot of rent-seeking regulatory fights about whether cable TV (and remote DVR services) count as bandwidth. To the extent that we think of "people being too online" as meaning arguing with strangers on Twitter rather than watching Stranger Things, Zooming inyo a work meeting, or calling your cousins in the Phillipines on WhatsApp, then a bandwidth tax would be counterproductive.
A simple way to estimate the effects of such a policy would be to measure the traffic going over cable/fiber ISPs vs 4G/5G mobile ISPs since cable/fiber is all you can eat but most people have data caps on 4G/5G.
Agree, this proposal is not good. Also you run into the fact that people get mad when you take away the thing they like. Instead, why not tax the companies for the money they earn from their most compulsive users. For gambling apps, impose steep marginal rates on companies as they get more money out of each individual user. For apps like tik-tok, impose high marginal rates on ad income earned on users’ >nth hour on the platform. Presumably if these companies didn’t earn as much from compulsive behavior they would stop desiging to promote it.
It would fucking kill work from home. I’d think Matt would be more sensitive to this, but maybe research doesn’t take that much bandwidth. Hell, it would kill work from the office., they still use bandwidth.
Paraphrasing Matt's conversation with that unnamed politician: "When asked about climate change, the politician lied to me. Then I indicated I didn't like that lie. So he gave me a different lie that I liked better."
I'm convinced that nothing Donald Trump does -- the lies, the corruption, the societal crimes great and small -- is any different *in kind* than any other politician. He turns most dials all the way up to 11, but he is doing the same stuff the rest of them do, just in less elegant, less genteel ways than the rest of the lot. We often ask "how could those rubes who voted for him not see he was lying all the time?" The answer is that we all vote for liars, just different ones.
Perhaps this is too cynical. But it's early and I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.
I think plenty of stuff that Trump does is different in kind. Trying to overturn the election, the stuff with Ukraine for which he was impeached the first time, the way he talks in very crude ways. These are meaningfully different from your average politician.
Different in degree, yes. In kind? I'm unconvinced.
Election overturning isn't new -- see Kennedy in 1960, Bush v Gore in 2000. LBJ and Nixon were both more crude than Trump's public statements (perhaps not his private ones, who knows). Looking for dirt on a political opponent using unethical means (as Trump did in Ukraine)? Yes, I think this happens all the time.
To be clear, being different in degree and the extent of Trump's sins are worse -- much, much worse -- than the others. But what a low bar we've set.
January 6th is meaningfully different than 1960 or 2000 because Trump created a mass movement around election denial. Kennedy and Bush didn't do that. This one is the most important difference.
Johnson and Nixon were cruder in private, but not in public and not in office. No other president has said stuff like "we will wipe out a civilization tomorrow."
Finding dirt: I really doubt that any previous president has threatened to condition military aid on a foreign leader making up dirt about a political opponent. Abusing the powers of office is an important difference from just "unethical means."
It’s both too cynical but also touches on the aspects of noble lying and lying about real costs and tradeoffs that have undermined public trust.
No politician is coming out and saying “X is expensive so you need to pay for it somehow.” It’s all we don’t need to care about paying for it or someone else will pay for it. With climate change the whole dismissal of the fact that there are lots of people in the oil and gas industries and what policies will do those jobs destroyed credibility and trust.
Indeed, and here we are, a society that thinks that we can spend all of “our money” on candy and toys and still have working infrastructure and services; that cutting “fraud, waste, and abuse” will fix the deficit; that “natural” products are harmless and “chemicals” are bad; and on and on and on.
I don’t exactly disagree, but to the point that I *think* Dan is making, the road to trump was paved with a lot of *other*, more mundane lying by politicians across the political spectrum.
As untruthful and outrageous as the shit Trump says, it's pretty predictable what he actually believes. I don't want to defend the voters' bad choices, but in contrast to the Dems motte-and-bailey where they promise everything to everybody, but pretty much do whatever "the Groups" want them to do in the background.
Saying things that are literally true but emphasize things in a way that the audience wants and lying about straightforward factual matters are actually quite different. That confused and ill-informed swing voters see them similarly is one of their big problems as political actors and you shouldn't join them.
Thanks for answering my question. Personally, I don’t think AOC can pull off that cultural pivot because her deepest convictions seem to be cultural issues the same way Mamdani’s stronger convictions appear to be foreign policy and taxes. None of them have Bernie’s genuine instincts on immigration.
If you don’t think this backtracking from explicit DEI stuff is significant from Mamdani, I would urge you to watch Josh Shapiro at Al Sharpton’s conference yesterday bragging that even as other states are dismantling their DEI offices, Pennsylvania has kept theirs.
Given those moves from Mamdani, I do think a hypothetical leftist can do this kind of pivot to focus only on oligarchy but I’m not convinced AOC has the stomach for it. I think she’s more likely to moderate on Medicare for All and foreign policy.
The key difference is positive-sum vs. zero-sum. Affirmative action is zero sum, taking spots from one group to another. DEI is positive-sum because it mostly consists of positive changes creating a more inclusive work environment that benefit everyone like more flexible work arrangements making it easier for women with childcare duties also make it easier for men or voluntary things like privately funded scholarships for minorities that wouldn’t exist at all otherwise.
You might actually see DEI work more like affirmative action in very left-wing places like NYC but your typical guy in Pennsylvania probably never encounters that type of DEI so that would explain the difference between Mamdani and Shapiro.
Unfortunately I think too many Democrats see 'moderation' as something like business friendly economics and/or more hawkish foreign policy, plus identity politics. This of course doesn't work since there are still plenty of Republicans out there who are hawkish on foreign policy and will support business interests (albeit in a slightly modified maybe more muted MAGA way), sans the toxic identity stuff. Essentially it's a moderation guaranteed not to move the needle.
They’re the worst grocery stores ever. They must be a tax dodge or some sort of real estate play in buildings he’s developing or something. How profitable could a bad NY grocery be?
On the topic of British salaries, I have some counterparts in the UK who love to complain that they get paid way less for doing comparable work to those of us in the US. But when they come over here for a business meeting, they're flabbergasted by the routine healthcare spending we have and the lack of any reliable transit options (amusingly enough, the two things the Brits love to complain about their own country). I haven't done the math but I suspect this comes out close to even.
It's not close. At all. The funny thing about the UK salaries of police is that they're actually fairly high compared to the norm. Median salary in the UK is £39k. In my trips to London for work with government agencies, you commonly run into mid level bureaucrats with real responsibilities and salaries under £30k. 10% of that is taken off immediately for NHS and pension.
In the states between SSA/Medicare/Medicaid and private health insurance we end up paying a similar amount for better care, and transit is simply not a huge % of income for most people. But our wages are nearly double UK median. I am highly, highly suspect of the NHS being an iota better than general private health insurance in the US. The issue is almost entirely due to the uninsured, if you have insurance in the US you're almost certainly getting a better deal most of the time.
I lived in the UK in the late 1990’s and have been back twice in the last couple of years. My subjective view is that the data is true, and that US living standards and incomes have grown significantly more than the UK, which seems stagnant, especially areas outside of London.
I have family up by the old Highbury stadium (go Gunners) so have somewhat regularly traveled since ~2003 or so, and I agree with your subjective view. It's sad but it's definitely true, MY has written about triple-lock and other EU-wide policies that have clearly backfired since then and the subjective 'cheapness' has definitely benefited my pocketbook. Being in DC now it's often cheaper to fly to the UK for a week or two stay (esp taking the train to visit areas outside London) than going back to Seattle where I grew up.
One interesting thing about Britain is that it now has a very high minimum wage of £12.71 an hour for people over 21. While that is good for low level workers who get a job, in a country where there is limited productivity growth you end up with wage compression which is further compounded with high marginal tax rates and student loans.
There is more to a high skill job than earning money, but that is quite a big part of it for most people. When people who have worked hard suffer through shitty pay rises and big tax rises, they start losing interest after a while.
I don’t necessarily agree with anything else this guy says, but this is true:
Yeah the obvious downside is that the flatness in wages means that the high min wage does not change much as you go 'up' the income/responsibility ladder. Being happy with that salary at 20 leaves a sour taste when your wage is only £16 at 30, and taxed more heavily at that.
I very much doubt it comes out even close to even. Americans are significantly more affluent than Brits. In London many people make good money and it can be hard to see. But go outside of the greater London area and it is a different world.
I had a friend who was in an entry-level engineer role at *Google* in London who said she was making 25k pounds. Equivalent people in the US would be making 5-10x that…
It isn't even slightly close, please send aid. Police officers are by far the best paid non-medics in the British state. Most administrators would earn more if they quit and claimed disability payments.
Agree with others that it won't pencil out financially, but if by 'come out even' you mean something like 'the financial on one side versus the things they wouldn't like about living in America' on the other, maybe that might be closer to the truth. Unlike doctors (many British doctors move abroad, especially to Australia and NZ), policemen tend to be parochial, patriotic/nationalistic, and to have less 'cosmopolitan' backgrounds which tends to make me think the uptake of such a scheme might not be as high as expected. Who knows though.
As a politically homeless Reagan conservative, the lack of any understanding of our fiscal and monetary crisis is both depressing and disturbing. The Biden spending was unnecessary, careless, and increased our debt and debt service. Out of the half a million charging stations created by the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, I think 19 were actually built. This inanity led to the Abundance Crowd upwelling. No, America still cannot build anything.
Ditto for Trump. I don’t remember my 2017 taxes as onerous. Tax cuts are not a panacea, and certainly the top rate going back to 39% from 37% would put them in a poor house. It is fiscal mismanagement. I remember reading that the 2017 Tax Cut put an average of $2500 in people's pockets. Big Whoop, that has been eating up by profligate spending, along with supply chain shocks from the pandemic. Trump has just added to the misery of inflation.
As usual, America needs a crisis to do anything. We will soon have it. There is still no nationwide discussion of the looming insolvency of SS and Medicare and what to do about it. I am also a victim of the housing crisis. I might consider selling and moving, were it not for the 2.75% mortgage rate I have. I’m not stupid.
As for AOC, race based politics are racially discriminatory. Currently, our public education is failing in our largest systems. Unacceptable rates of failing to read or do math at expected standards are a huge problem for a country that is not having enough babies to sustain our population. The answer is not money. The issue is that we are lacking a culture of education. We are raising children who do not understand they have a job. Their job is not soccer or spending hours watching TikTok videos. It is to educate themselves to be prepared to take over America from their parents.
Democrats figuring out how to discriminate against Asians because they are smarter, because they do their homework, is loony. Education is how success is made.
Finally, MAGA is not conservative; it is populist drivel and one of the more depressing ideas that Democrats are being more populist than their Republican counterparts by offering more and more paid-for items. It is populist drivel to suggest the rich can pay for every populist wish list item they want. If European social welfare is what you really want you better have social welfare tax policies. You'd better be prepared to tell the middle class that you’ll more likely to have 50% tax rates for their free child care and health care, subsidized housing, food, and utilities.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and yet progressives insist there is.
A Democrat who suggested that we need to reform NEPA would probably become a heretic and be tossed from the Party. If, however, you want to build things in America, NEPA is your enemy.
Environmental groups have become litigators. They use laws to prevent everything and anything. If you want more EVs, you'd better be prepared to do some mining.
I swear to God, our politicians are among the dumbest people I have ever met, and I don’t care how charming they are.
I think we need to stop thinking of Joe Manchin exclusively as his frozen-in-amber manifestation in 2021 and 2022, forever young and trying to yank Democratic policy center-wise.
Joe Manchin has become a totem for arguing about the big-tentism (or lack thereof) of Democrats, and I would argue we shouldn't.
It's better to think of Joe Manchin in the big-picture, as who he is (and was) from the beginning of the Biden era to the present day.
In that big-picture wide angle, he comes off far less admirably.
Manchin (rightly) argued that Democrats needed him in office, and he needed to do certain things to survive in office in West Virginia. That argument was right in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
It abruptly stopped being right in 2024, when he not only surrendered his seat to a MAGA Republican, but all but warmly greeted Jim Justice to his chair.
Much worse: Manchin paired that with a bitter, furious backstab of his former colleague Kamala Harris, the only human being standing in the way of Donald Trump's retribution on America, on his way out the door.
It's one thing to stand for the Senate filibuster, and represent your constituents by defending it to the bitter end. Manchin wasn't the only one doing that, anyway.
It's quite another to make it your excuse for--when you're retiring and have nothing to lose--refusing to endorse the last person in Trump's way.
It's yet another to, two months before Election Day, tell Kamala Harris, "To hell with you" over it.
I know. For most people here, even in 2026, saying ANYTHING negative about Joe Manchin is--still!--a sign of "small tentism". Or Mitch McConnell's dearest friend. (Tom Nichols called me just that a couple months ago, in response to me saying all these things.)
Honestly, it's not even that I mind. It's the complete inability of too many people to think of any persona, Joe Manchin or otherwise, outside of their greatest hits, from long long ago.
Implicitly, you're assuming that Manchin was operating as a master strategist the whole time. The simpler explanation for his actions is just that he really believed all the stuff he said about bipartisanship, moderation, etc. Buddy of mine who's a lobbyist apparently talked to Manchin's staff a bunch during the IRA process and that was his takeaway.
I have no such connections but every published anecdote I've read suggests the same. He is (was) an ancestral WVA Democrat who made his career on the approach he took to politics. I think the derangement about him is similar to the derangement about AOC. Just as someone has to be the most left wing Democrat in the house someone has to be the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, at least to the extent we care about majorities anymore.
That's certainly consistent with the polls. All signs are that Democrats are going to benefit quite a bit from anti-Trump backlash, which under the circumstances I'll take, but they're still extremely unpopular and untrusted on the same core issues that made MAGA viable in the first place.
1) They lost to Trump, twice, and he is obviously terrible.
2) They kept making terrible predictions about Trump and him being an existential threat and their actions didn’t reflect that (in many ways Democrats treated Trump as a joke and not a real threat.)
This sounds right to me. And after the way he was excoriated by the rest of the Dem caucus during Bidens term, it would be almost shocking if he did not feel some bitterness on his way out.
The amount of good he could have done not just for the country but specifically for West Virginia, if he'd actually seized the opportunity of a Dem trifecta where he was the key vote, makes my blood boil.
The semiconductor money for the most part was not spent or was not directed at the correct purpose. The best part of the idea was the venture investing. That was canceled by the current administration.
Intel, for example, was not directed to create an independent foundry and instead of getting useful capital it was forced to sell 10% of the company to the government. The overwhelming percentage of the energy spending that was planned has not ever occurred. Talking about spending as if it occurs when a law is enacted is a huge category mistake.
I met Mitch Daniels in person several times when I was at Purdue and, in addition to having personal charisma, he had a great ability to avoid directly arguing when I said something he didn't agree with. He'd just artfully deflect.
I think in general most people benefit from having a hard stop on parties and 1-2am is when things should shut down. In my experience if you let people party until 5am you don’t get more partying, people just start the party later. Few benefits and more costs!
> Now who knows, maybe no British cops would want to come police over here in the United States where the criminals are carrying guns. But I think it’s worth exploring!
While we are at it, why not import other practices as well. Most beat cops, including the London bobbies are unarmed. What a refreshingly civilized way to police in a system of self government.
So far as I know there aren't a lot of British police moving to the US, but various cities and states in Australia have made efforts to recruit British police, apparently with some success.
The ability to move between various Anglosphere countries is, beyond a certain point, a discipline on bad governance in any one of them, because the others can poach from them fairly easily.
Any sort of spending under the Biden administration was likely going to be cursed by inflationary pressures in the end anyway. Even with permanent programs, either the Republicans would have repealed it, or the deficit would grow larger to make the pressure worse and the Democrats' ambitions limited the next time they get power. It's going to be a real buzzkill when the policy likely needs to be more of revenue generation than new spending the next time, starting with the looming Social Security Trust Fund drama.
I'm also surprised Matt didn't mention one of his favorite things that the GOP axed and was revenue generating--the funding of IRS enforcement.
I wouldn't say I *met* Bill Bradley, but I was kind of in the same room as him once years ago, and he didn't seem extroverted at all. He actually came across as shy. But he was very tall. Maybe having played in The League (in any of the four sports) has a charisma all its own.
Bit late to open an article with an April fools joke - I suggest when you are there that you ask a bunch of people in the UK what salary they would accept to be a cop in the states. "Everyone has a price", yes, but the general view in the UK of the USA is that it's full of violent shootings and drugs. I suspect you'd need to double the salary of a DC cop to get meaningful hits on this.
There is no amount of money that would make me quit my current job to be a beat cop. Having to deal everyday with the worst of society or even having to deal with normal people on the worst day of their life. Ugh, I'd rather scrub toilets.
Yes, it's under-rating the difference in policing culture I think. A lot of British police won't have much or even any experience holding a gun (95% of police do not carry firearms in the UK) and the general 'policing by consent' model would make them look embarrassingly soft by American standards.
I didn’t listen to the pod with Beutler, but what the stated take on Biden’s legacy misses is that the ARP was not an effort to “avoid depression”, but rather an effort to catalyze recovery and produce a tight labor market as fast as possible. That unambiguously worked. Further, it’s not clear just how much the ARP juiced inflation. It may have been meaningfully worse politically to have done less, which could have left subsequent Democrats running in an economy that featured comparable inflation with meaningfully more anemic growth and labor market dynamics.
To the extent he failed it was in underestimating how much people would hate inflation even if they were richer in real terms.
Bandwidth consumption is not a good proxy for unhealthy relationships to the internet. There are innumerable ways to consume a lot of data that are healthy and even economically productive.
How many hours could I spent reading incendiary articles or 4chan posts in the same bandwidth budget of a 10-minute educational YouTube video in 4K?
Yeah, this is totally unworkable. Two other big problems: using the internet for work is quite common these days and things like video calls use a lot of bandwidth. Also, movie streaming and television for lots of people is delivered over the internet instead of being separate as it was when people had cable for everything.
The correct approach is to ban targeted advertising. No one likes it, it's clearly permissible as a law, and it would devastate the relevant companies.
"using the internet for work is quite common these days and things like video calls use a lot of bandwidth"
Imagine the Jack Nicholson smiling and nodding animated GIF here, except instead of Jack Nicholson, it's me.
> The correct approach is to ban targeted advertising. No one likes it
Is this true? As a lifelong advertising antagonist/ignorer, I actually really like the ads I see on Instagram.
For the first time in my life, I am seeing advertisements for things I want to buy. Am I a huge outlier?
I feel like I always get ads for stuff I already bought and by definition am no longer in need of.
As an experiment I just looked at the first 10 ads I got in my Instagram stories. Of them, I think 2 were for brands that I would consider buying from, maybe 2 more where I understand where they were coming from with targeting me.
Ah, good idea! I just tried it and only saw 3 from brands/products I'd consider buying from (out of 10), but all except one of the rest were understandable.
Given those numbers, you won't be surprised that I made several purchases over the last six months, so you can blame me for all of this!
Personally, it's just a very large improvement over the weak targeted ads I've seen prior (me reading the New Yorker circa 2005: "lol they think I'm going to buy a Cartier watch, lol".)
Having said that, I'm not trying to represent myself as typical, just adding a data point. Furthermore, I agree it's spooky when ads follow you around the Internet.
The number of car ads I get make me think the targeting is still way off.
I do sometimes find Instagram ads to be well targeted. But not that much more than eg magazine ads were in the 2000s. What I think people dislike most is when ads seem to know too much about them, or when you visit one site and then they follow you around the internet.
I’m probably the outlier, but I *hate* ads including targeted ads. I don’t want the algorithm pushing me to buy s*** I don’t need.
During our last visit to my in-laws, we used their pool table a bit. I swear I did nothing online to suggest we had. I didn't Google anything about it. But suddenly YouTube was suggesting billiards tips videos to me. I bet a ban on that sort of creepiness would be popular.
I’ve had similar experiences and also loathe the creepiness; I am surprised that most people I know don’t seem to care. I also spent a lot of time googling specific lung cancer chemotherapy treatments when my mother was dying - I wanted to get a sense of the efficacy so I was looking for journal articles and the like - and I still get lung cancer ads when my blocker isn’t working well.
Were you using their wifi?
Adblock is my friend, it just keeps me blissfully unaware of what ads are being targeted to me.
Which browser/blocker do you use? I have had limited success on Firefox and Safari
Firefox with uBlock Origin, plus some other more advance element blocking to blot out non-ad annoying shit like popups for email signups and such.
Just slap a massive excise tax on social media, so massive that it hugely reduces the profitability of the sector.
Preferably you want to both drive capital out of investing in the sector *and* force it to move to a subscription model that we know very few people will pay for.
Same thing, albeit at a lower level, for video streaming.
A much more plausible government intervention, IMO, is higher taxes on video ads. That's the engine under the infinite scroll. If you make that revenue less profitable, the engineering and product focus will shift to other (hopefully, presumably) less harmful business activities.
And in the meantime, there are jury verdicts. It is silly - and uninformed - to dismiss the effect of large jury verdicts on company behavior.
Legislative changes blocked by industry lobbies sometimes become more palatable if they also provide relief from a rising number of large verdicts.
Yeah I wonder if Matt read that article about tobacco litigation that I'm blanking on who wrote it...
Exactly. In practice, a bandwidth tax would be a Netflix and Zoom tax and so this would have minimal effects on text-based social media usage while basically ending the remote work trend as well as create a lot of rent-seeking regulatory fights about whether cable TV (and remote DVR services) count as bandwidth. To the extent that we think of "people being too online" as meaning arguing with strangers on Twitter rather than watching Stranger Things, Zooming inyo a work meeting, or calling your cousins in the Phillipines on WhatsApp, then a bandwidth tax would be counterproductive.
A simple way to estimate the effects of such a policy would be to measure the traffic going over cable/fiber ISPs vs 4G/5G mobile ISPs since cable/fiber is all you can eat but most people have data caps on 4G/5G.
Agree, this proposal is not good. Also you run into the fact that people get mad when you take away the thing they like. Instead, why not tax the companies for the money they earn from their most compulsive users. For gambling apps, impose steep marginal rates on companies as they get more money out of each individual user. For apps like tik-tok, impose high marginal rates on ad income earned on users’ >nth hour on the platform. Presumably if these companies didn’t earn as much from compulsive behavior they would stop desiging to promote it.
It would fucking kill work from home. I’d think Matt would be more sensitive to this, but maybe research doesn’t take that much bandwidth. Hell, it would kill work from the office., they still use bandwidth.
Matt doesn't like working from home, so he'd just nod harder at the first half, until you tell him the second half.
Wait, doesn’t he? Does Slow Boring have an actual office? I thought he’s talked about his basement home office before
Yeah it's also easily fungible. Just make it directly tied to time used rather than some weird proxy if the actual goal is less time.
Paraphrasing Matt's conversation with that unnamed politician: "When asked about climate change, the politician lied to me. Then I indicated I didn't like that lie. So he gave me a different lie that I liked better."
I'm convinced that nothing Donald Trump does -- the lies, the corruption, the societal crimes great and small -- is any different *in kind* than any other politician. He turns most dials all the way up to 11, but he is doing the same stuff the rest of them do, just in less elegant, less genteel ways than the rest of the lot. We often ask "how could those rubes who voted for him not see he was lying all the time?" The answer is that we all vote for liars, just different ones.
Perhaps this is too cynical. But it's early and I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.
I think plenty of stuff that Trump does is different in kind. Trying to overturn the election, the stuff with Ukraine for which he was impeached the first time, the way he talks in very crude ways. These are meaningfully different from your average politician.
Different in degree, yes. In kind? I'm unconvinced.
Election overturning isn't new -- see Kennedy in 1960, Bush v Gore in 2000. LBJ and Nixon were both more crude than Trump's public statements (perhaps not his private ones, who knows). Looking for dirt on a political opponent using unethical means (as Trump did in Ukraine)? Yes, I think this happens all the time.
To be clear, being different in degree and the extent of Trump's sins are worse -- much, much worse -- than the others. But what a low bar we've set.
January 6th is meaningfully different than 1960 or 2000 because Trump created a mass movement around election denial. Kennedy and Bush didn't do that. This one is the most important difference.
Johnson and Nixon were cruder in private, but not in public and not in office. No other president has said stuff like "we will wipe out a civilization tomorrow."
Finding dirt: I really doubt that any previous president has threatened to condition military aid on a foreign leader making up dirt about a political opponent. Abusing the powers of office is an important difference from just "unethical means."
Also all the insider trading and settling a court case filed by himself — nice infinite money buttons there.
You say he turns up the dial to 11, but it seems more like 11,000 to me.
This much difference in degree is really a difference in kind, because the magnitude of the difference is just so huge.
Kennedy did not overturn the 1960 election!
You are correct. He stole it fair-and-square.
Nothing Trump does is different in kind from any other politician?
AYFKM?
Have we all just memory-holed Jan 6?
How many other American politicians *refused to concede* when they lost an election?
It’s both too cynical but also touches on the aspects of noble lying and lying about real costs and tradeoffs that have undermined public trust.
No politician is coming out and saying “X is expensive so you need to pay for it somehow.” It’s all we don’t need to care about paying for it or someone else will pay for it. With climate change the whole dismissal of the fact that there are lots of people in the oil and gas industries and what policies will do those jobs destroyed credibility and trust.
I think this is an *extremely* underrated contributor to our current situation.
This type of lying infantilizes people.
Indeed, and here we are, a society that thinks that we can spend all of “our money” on candy and toys and still have working infrastructure and services; that cutting “fraud, waste, and abuse” will fix the deficit; that “natural” products are harmless and “chemicals” are bad; and on and on and on.
It's the go-to tactic of the far right, and the road to Putinism. Everyone is lying, so let's willingly support the biggest liar.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/mailbag-parenting-and-politics/comment/104140099
I don’t exactly disagree, but to the point that I *think* Dan is making, the road to trump was paved with a lot of *other*, more mundane lying by politicians across the political spectrum.
As untruthful and outrageous as the shit Trump says, it's pretty predictable what he actually believes. I don't want to defend the voters' bad choices, but in contrast to the Dems motte-and-bailey where they promise everything to everybody, but pretty much do whatever "the Groups" want them to do in the background.
Saying things that are literally true but emphasize things in a way that the audience wants and lying about straightforward factual matters are actually quite different. That confused and ill-informed swing voters see them similarly is one of their big problems as political actors and you shouldn't join them.
Yeah, turned up to 11 and with utter shamelessness that most of humanity is not quite capable of.
Trump doesn’t just lie though. His actions are what make him materially different from other politicians.
The difference is about goals. Most democratic politicians actually do want to help their constituents.
What do you believe non-Democratic politicians want?
Well the Greens want to have Republicans elected and want to facilitate Russian imperial ambitions.
Thanks for answering my question. Personally, I don’t think AOC can pull off that cultural pivot because her deepest convictions seem to be cultural issues the same way Mamdani’s stronger convictions appear to be foreign policy and taxes. None of them have Bernie’s genuine instincts on immigration.
Your theory of leftist moderating on racial issues is interesting because Mamdani is already trying to dilute the DEI stuff: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/nyregion/mamdani-dei-report.html
If you don’t think this backtracking from explicit DEI stuff is significant from Mamdani, I would urge you to watch Josh Shapiro at Al Sharpton’s conference yesterday bragging that even as other states are dismantling their DEI offices, Pennsylvania has kept theirs.
He’s also trying to downplay climate and has explicitly refused to criticize Hochul for moderating on climate when asked https://nysfocus.com/2026/03/26/clcpa-climate-rollbacks-hochul-mamdani-budget
Given those moves from Mamdani, I do think a hypothetical leftist can do this kind of pivot to focus only on oligarchy but I’m not convinced AOC has the stomach for it. I think she’s more likely to moderate on Medicare for All and foreign policy.
DEI isn’t the same as affirmative action and polls much more positively: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/19/views-of-dei-have-become-slightly-more-negative-among-us-workers/
The key difference is positive-sum vs. zero-sum. Affirmative action is zero sum, taking spots from one group to another. DEI is positive-sum because it mostly consists of positive changes creating a more inclusive work environment that benefit everyone like more flexible work arrangements making it easier for women with childcare duties also make it easier for men or voluntary things like privately funded scholarships for minorities that wouldn’t exist at all otherwise.
You might actually see DEI work more like affirmative action in very left-wing places like NYC but your typical guy in Pennsylvania probably never encounters that type of DEI so that would explain the difference between Mamdani and Shapiro.
I think lots of supposedly far left Democrats especially in New York are more Tammany Hall than Marx.
Unfortunately I think too many Democrats see 'moderation' as something like business friendly economics and/or more hawkish foreign policy, plus identity politics. This of course doesn't work since there are still plenty of Republicans out there who are hawkish on foreign policy and will support business interests (albeit in a slightly modified maybe more muted MAGA way), sans the toxic identity stuff. Essentially it's a moderation guaranteed not to move the needle.
I thought John Catsimatidis promised to close down his grocery stores and leave NYC if Mamdani was elected?
They’re the worst grocery stores ever. They must be a tax dodge or some sort of real estate play in buildings he’s developing or something. How profitable could a bad NY grocery be?
I wish he would!!
On the topic of British salaries, I have some counterparts in the UK who love to complain that they get paid way less for doing comparable work to those of us in the US. But when they come over here for a business meeting, they're flabbergasted by the routine healthcare spending we have and the lack of any reliable transit options (amusingly enough, the two things the Brits love to complain about their own country). I haven't done the math but I suspect this comes out close to even.
It's not close. At all. The funny thing about the UK salaries of police is that they're actually fairly high compared to the norm. Median salary in the UK is £39k. In my trips to London for work with government agencies, you commonly run into mid level bureaucrats with real responsibilities and salaries under £30k. 10% of that is taken off immediately for NHS and pension.
In the states between SSA/Medicare/Medicaid and private health insurance we end up paying a similar amount for better care, and transit is simply not a huge % of income for most people. But our wages are nearly double UK median. I am highly, highly suspect of the NHS being an iota better than general private health insurance in the US. The issue is almost entirely due to the uninsured, if you have insurance in the US you're almost certainly getting a better deal most of the time.
I lived in the UK in the late 1990’s and have been back twice in the last couple of years. My subjective view is that the data is true, and that US living standards and incomes have grown significantly more than the UK, which seems stagnant, especially areas outside of London.
I have family up by the old Highbury stadium (go Gunners) so have somewhat regularly traveled since ~2003 or so, and I agree with your subjective view. It's sad but it's definitely true, MY has written about triple-lock and other EU-wide policies that have clearly backfired since then and the subjective 'cheapness' has definitely benefited my pocketbook. Being in DC now it's often cheaper to fly to the UK for a week or two stay (esp taking the train to visit areas outside London) than going back to Seattle where I grew up.
One interesting thing about Britain is that it now has a very high minimum wage of £12.71 an hour for people over 21. While that is good for low level workers who get a job, in a country where there is limited productivity growth you end up with wage compression which is further compounded with high marginal tax rates and student loans.
There is more to a high skill job than earning money, but that is quite a big part of it for most people. When people who have worked hard suffer through shitty pay rises and big tax rises, they start losing interest after a while.
I don’t necessarily agree with anything else this guy says, but this is true:
https://x.com/ZynxBTC/status/2042141546481340448
Yeah the obvious downside is that the flatness in wages means that the high min wage does not change much as you go 'up' the income/responsibility ladder. Being happy with that salary at 20 leaves a sour taste when your wage is only £16 at 30, and taxed more heavily at that.
I very much doubt it comes out even close to even. Americans are significantly more affluent than Brits. In London many people make good money and it can be hard to see. But go outside of the greater London area and it is a different world.
I had a friend who was in an entry-level engineer role at *Google* in London who said she was making 25k pounds. Equivalent people in the US would be making 5-10x that…
It isn't even slightly close, please send aid. Police officers are by far the best paid non-medics in the British state. Most administrators would earn more if they quit and claimed disability payments.
Agree with others that it won't pencil out financially, but if by 'come out even' you mean something like 'the financial on one side versus the things they wouldn't like about living in America' on the other, maybe that might be closer to the truth. Unlike doctors (many British doctors move abroad, especially to Australia and NZ), policemen tend to be parochial, patriotic/nationalistic, and to have less 'cosmopolitan' backgrounds which tends to make me think the uptake of such a scheme might not be as high as expected. Who knows though.
As a politically homeless Reagan conservative, the lack of any understanding of our fiscal and monetary crisis is both depressing and disturbing. The Biden spending was unnecessary, careless, and increased our debt and debt service. Out of the half a million charging stations created by the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, I think 19 were actually built. This inanity led to the Abundance Crowd upwelling. No, America still cannot build anything.
Ditto for Trump. I don’t remember my 2017 taxes as onerous. Tax cuts are not a panacea, and certainly the top rate going back to 39% from 37% would put them in a poor house. It is fiscal mismanagement. I remember reading that the 2017 Tax Cut put an average of $2500 in people's pockets. Big Whoop, that has been eating up by profligate spending, along with supply chain shocks from the pandemic. Trump has just added to the misery of inflation.
As usual, America needs a crisis to do anything. We will soon have it. There is still no nationwide discussion of the looming insolvency of SS and Medicare and what to do about it. I am also a victim of the housing crisis. I might consider selling and moving, were it not for the 2.75% mortgage rate I have. I’m not stupid.
As for AOC, race based politics are racially discriminatory. Currently, our public education is failing in our largest systems. Unacceptable rates of failing to read or do math at expected standards are a huge problem for a country that is not having enough babies to sustain our population. The answer is not money. The issue is that we are lacking a culture of education. We are raising children who do not understand they have a job. Their job is not soccer or spending hours watching TikTok videos. It is to educate themselves to be prepared to take over America from their parents.
Democrats figuring out how to discriminate against Asians because they are smarter, because they do their homework, is loony. Education is how success is made.
Finally, MAGA is not conservative; it is populist drivel and one of the more depressing ideas that Democrats are being more populist than their Republican counterparts by offering more and more paid-for items. It is populist drivel to suggest the rich can pay for every populist wish list item they want. If European social welfare is what you really want you better have social welfare tax policies. You'd better be prepared to tell the middle class that you’ll more likely to have 50% tax rates for their free child care and health care, subsidized housing, food, and utilities.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and yet progressives insist there is.
A Democrat who suggested that we need to reform NEPA would probably become a heretic and be tossed from the Party. If, however, you want to build things in America, NEPA is your enemy.
Environmental groups have become litigators. They use laws to prevent everything and anything. If you want more EVs, you'd better be prepared to do some mining.
I swear to God, our politicians are among the dumbest people I have ever met, and I don’t care how charming they are.
Time to make every Slow Boring dude mad:
I think we need to stop thinking of Joe Manchin exclusively as his frozen-in-amber manifestation in 2021 and 2022, forever young and trying to yank Democratic policy center-wise.
Joe Manchin has become a totem for arguing about the big-tentism (or lack thereof) of Democrats, and I would argue we shouldn't.
It's better to think of Joe Manchin in the big-picture, as who he is (and was) from the beginning of the Biden era to the present day.
In that big-picture wide angle, he comes off far less admirably.
Manchin (rightly) argued that Democrats needed him in office, and he needed to do certain things to survive in office in West Virginia. That argument was right in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
It abruptly stopped being right in 2024, when he not only surrendered his seat to a MAGA Republican, but all but warmly greeted Jim Justice to his chair.
Much worse: Manchin paired that with a bitter, furious backstab of his former colleague Kamala Harris, the only human being standing in the way of Donald Trump's retribution on America, on his way out the door.
It's one thing to stand for the Senate filibuster, and represent your constituents by defending it to the bitter end. Manchin wasn't the only one doing that, anyway.
It's quite another to make it your excuse for--when you're retiring and have nothing to lose--refusing to endorse the last person in Trump's way.
It's yet another to, two months before Election Day, tell Kamala Harris, "To hell with you" over it.
I know. For most people here, even in 2026, saying ANYTHING negative about Joe Manchin is--still!--a sign of "small tentism". Or Mitch McConnell's dearest friend. (Tom Nichols called me just that a couple months ago, in response to me saying all these things.)
Honestly, it's not even that I mind. It's the complete inability of too many people to think of any persona, Joe Manchin or otherwise, outside of their greatest hits, from long long ago.
Rant over. Carry on.
Implicitly, you're assuming that Manchin was operating as a master strategist the whole time. The simpler explanation for his actions is just that he really believed all the stuff he said about bipartisanship, moderation, etc. Buddy of mine who's a lobbyist apparently talked to Manchin's staff a bunch during the IRA process and that was his takeaway.
I have no such connections but every published anecdote I've read suggests the same. He is (was) an ancestral WVA Democrat who made his career on the approach he took to politics. I think the derangement about him is similar to the derangement about AOC. Just as someone has to be the most left wing Democrat in the house someone has to be the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, at least to the extent we care about majorities anymore.
It feels like Democrats have decided the median voter theory doesn’t apply to elections any more and that they can just manifest electoral support.
That's certainly consistent with the polls. All signs are that Democrats are going to benefit quite a bit from anti-Trump backlash, which under the circumstances I'll take, but they're still extremely unpopular and untrusted on the same core issues that made MAGA viable in the first place.
Two reasons people have lost faith in Democrats.
1) They lost to Trump, twice, and he is obviously terrible.
2) They kept making terrible predictions about Trump and him being an existential threat and their actions didn’t reflect that (in many ways Democrats treated Trump as a joke and not a real threat.)
This sounds right to me. And after the way he was excoriated by the rest of the Dem caucus during Bidens term, it would be almost shocking if he did not feel some bitterness on his way out.
The amount of good he could have done not just for the country but specifically for West Virginia, if he'd actually seized the opportunity of a Dem trifecta where he was the key vote, makes my blood boil.
The semiconductor money for the most part was not spent or was not directed at the correct purpose. The best part of the idea was the venture investing. That was canceled by the current administration.
Intel, for example, was not directed to create an independent foundry and instead of getting useful capital it was forced to sell 10% of the company to the government. The overwhelming percentage of the energy spending that was planned has not ever occurred. Talking about spending as if it occurs when a law is enacted is a huge category mistake.
I met Mitch Daniels in person several times when I was at Purdue and, in addition to having personal charisma, he had a great ability to avoid directly arguing when I said something he didn't agree with. He'd just artfully deflect.
Enjoy the UK, Matt! I'm sure you'll let the Brits know how insane the Triple Lock is.
I think in general most people benefit from having a hard stop on parties and 1-2am is when things should shut down. In my experience if you let people party until 5am you don’t get more partying, people just start the party later. Few benefits and more costs!
Useful reminder that America was founded by Puritans here.
> Now who knows, maybe no British cops would want to come police over here in the United States where the criminals are carrying guns. But I think it’s worth exploring!
While we are at it, why not import other practices as well. Most beat cops, including the London bobbies are unarmed. What a refreshingly civilized way to police in a system of self government.
So far as I know there aren't a lot of British police moving to the US, but various cities and states in Australia have made efforts to recruit British police, apparently with some success.
The ability to move between various Anglosphere countries is, beyond a certain point, a discipline on bad governance in any one of them, because the others can poach from them fairly easily.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14621695/Australian-police-campaign-British-cops.html
Any sort of spending under the Biden administration was likely going to be cursed by inflationary pressures in the end anyway. Even with permanent programs, either the Republicans would have repealed it, or the deficit would grow larger to make the pressure worse and the Democrats' ambitions limited the next time they get power. It's going to be a real buzzkill when the policy likely needs to be more of revenue generation than new spending the next time, starting with the looming Social Security Trust Fund drama.
I'm also surprised Matt didn't mention one of his favorite things that the GOP axed and was revenue generating--the funding of IRS enforcement.
I wouldn't say I *met* Bill Bradley, but I was kind of in the same room as him once years ago, and he didn't seem extroverted at all. He actually came across as shy. But he was very tall. Maybe having played in The League (in any of the four sports) has a charisma all its own.
Bit late to open an article with an April fools joke - I suggest when you are there that you ask a bunch of people in the UK what salary they would accept to be a cop in the states. "Everyone has a price", yes, but the general view in the UK of the USA is that it's full of violent shootings and drugs. I suspect you'd need to double the salary of a DC cop to get meaningful hits on this.
There is no amount of money that would make me quit my current job to be a beat cop. Having to deal everyday with the worst of society or even having to deal with normal people on the worst day of their life. Ugh, I'd rather scrub toilets.
Yes, it's under-rating the difference in policing culture I think. A lot of British police won't have much or even any experience holding a gun (95% of police do not carry firearms in the UK) and the general 'policing by consent' model would make them look embarrassingly soft by American standards.
I didn’t listen to the pod with Beutler, but what the stated take on Biden’s legacy misses is that the ARP was not an effort to “avoid depression”, but rather an effort to catalyze recovery and produce a tight labor market as fast as possible. That unambiguously worked. Further, it’s not clear just how much the ARP juiced inflation. It may have been meaningfully worse politically to have done less, which could have left subsequent Democrats running in an economy that featured comparable inflation with meaningfully more anemic growth and labor market dynamics.
To the extent he failed it was in underestimating how much people would hate inflation even if they were richer in real terms.