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.
Reading the responses below…am I the only one who gets nothing but medication ads for conditions I don’t have? (Or do I? Does the algorithm know something I don’t?)
That parenthetical sounds way too plausible, like a great Black Mirror episode or an unpublished Philip K Dick novel.
It would be a dark irony if frontier AI labs thew everything they had at diagnostic inference and made steady but unexciting progress, while YouTube and co started predicting rare disorders with super-clinical accuracy between TurboTax and political ads.
I’m more likely to buy something I see in an instructional video on YouTube than anything that has been out in a formal advertising channel by a wild margin.
Google should have more than enough info to barrage me with ads for good whiskey and wine, high quality cookware, home improvement equipment or tools, international travel, and non-fiction books.
*Ultra-fine print disclaimer: recommended temporal distance between whiskey and table saw use may vary by individual, consult with your physician before using whiskey and table saws.
I've observed the same thing. I wonder if the poor targeting is because google/facebook/etc. don't do a good job or if the relevant companies aren't paying for that type of targeted advertising. E.g. if I watch a cooking video on YouTube, it is often sponsored by some company selling cookware, so they can target advertising very directly that way instead of paying google (and some youtubers are very slick at putting ads into their videos).
Oh, definitely some of that, but I’ve used google to go dig into a bunch of stuff that indicates obvious commercial interest and gotten nary a baited hook dangled in front of me.
I once spent hours over the course of a week reading up on high-carbon stainless alloys and case hardening from a dozen websites specializing in high end knives and forums on making knives.
Never once do I recall seeing an advertisement for chef’s knives of any grade in the following six or eight months.
This was in 2018; I bought a set of “prosumer” knives from a manufacturer in my wife’s hometown when we visited that year.
Amazon subsequently decided, in the last six months, that I must be interested in knives on the basis of having bought a seasoning blend for cast iron.
You're doing something wrong. Most, or at least a good many, of the ads I get are for boat parts and woodworking tools. Have you seen all the cool new jigs for cabinet hardware?
Yeah, I've had the same experience on YouTube. The ads I've seen are poorly targeted, which is baffling considering how much information they have about me.
My positive experiences have mostly been on Instagram.
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.
I never quite hated ads, because I didn't feel strong emotions about them, but until a year ago, I just considered them obstacles.
This is pretty weird territory for me and so far specific to Instagram (YouTube's ads don't get it done). Often enough now, I see something that might solve a problem or is delightful in some way, so I open the link in a browser tab to review later. The ratio of content to ads is getting bad enough that I'm starting to use it less, but that's a different problem.
I can see how IG could be a hellscape: "Facebook, but with less text!" sounds like a satirical pitch for the world's worst app.
But I have several different accounts (for art, music, and my personal life), and somehow all three remain mostly compelling. I estimate I see 50% accounts I follow, 25% recommendations, and 25% advertisements. If the ads and recs get even a little worse, my usage will drop fast.
I like it when I travel and see ads for sites or events where I am. That's how I discovered the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I never would have guessed that such a great little professional theater would be located on the ultra-touristy Navy Pier. Recommend!
Exactly! I don't want to oversell my enthusiasm, but to put things in Slow Boring terms, the product discovery has, on occasion, given me a genuine consumer surplus!
The Chicago theater and classical-music scenes are literally the only things I miss about my dreary years as a twentysomething dot-com employee in the Loop.
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.
Small sample but that seems pretty good! If you believe that advertising can be positive-sum at all then showing users ~40% well-targeted ads is not a small economic gain relative to basically-untargeted linear television advertising. (And if you don’t believe advertising can be positive-sum at all, why stop at banning targeted ads?)
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 mean that's the problem, right? The ads work well, which means they make a lot of money, which means there's a big pot of money to sustain the overall ecosystem
Oh I see what you mean. I read that as saying "no one likes" that this is the only policy that will work but I think you're right, he was claiming that nobody likes targeted ads, which is wrong. Though I guess if you asked people they'd say they don't like targeted ads, but their revealed preference is different.
Instagram specifically really has my number in a way the other providers don't. They can microtarget not just 'art supplies' but 'art supplies of the specific kind Kade was already thinking of buying', it's really baffling.
I completely agree. Every time I'm watching some sporting event that's got mass-market ads, it's much less relevant to me. I don't have moderate to severe ulcerative colitis (which is roughly half of Rx ads it seems), but I could probably be talked into buying a new fleece from REI via those targeted ads!
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.
I heard someone say, maybe even on this forum, would you rather have untargeted ads?
Do companies really spend less money on advertising today than they used to, or is it just the fewer channels available to them? Newspapers and magazines were always mostly ads, they just weren't near monopolies.
A lot depends on what you mean by "targeted" -- all advertising is targeted in some sense, and always has been (buyers pick the channels they want to buy inventory from based on their audience). I suspect what you mean is "individually targeted". And here the evidence is that the biggest companies are actually in the best position to survive, because they have enough data to make excellent probabilistic bets about what to show you even without individually tracking you. See Eric Seufert's writing on Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative for more on this.
With that said I agree with the upstream point about bandwidth being a bad proxy for the externalities of digital consumption. This not only makes it an awkward remedy, but invites bad politics for getting anything enacted. Do you really want Netflix lobbying against you when you were trying to go after Meta and Tiktok?
For better or worse we already know what the path forward on this looks like, and it's embedded in the original mailbag question: it's age-gating these resources. Plenty of states are pursuing it, iterating the policy as courts raise objections. We have existence proofs of it working, despite civil society groups' best efforts to pretend otherwise. The politics are good--the only people who object to it either can't vote, are industry shills, or are so completely and appallingly fried by digital addiction that their continued proselytizing does more to hurt than help their cause (cf Taylor Lorenz). And fundamentally "think of the children" wins over "don't tread on me". I think we'll wind up with fairly wide-ranging bans/a version of COPPA that's actually enforced, then revisit when the generation that comes of age under more restrictive conditions experiences corporations abruptly lunging for their nucleus accumbens the day they turn 18.
I doubt it's *clearly* permissible as a law given the supreme court's recent commercial speech cases. Particularly if it's explicitly designed as a way to crush social media companies. This is one reason to favor taxes over bans.
Moody v Netchoice (2024) strongly implied there is at least some first amendment interest in curating the news feed, although there was disagreement among the conservatives and the case is ongoing. It's definitely an open question and it probably won't turn on a buyer/seller distinction.
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.
I think the screen time controls that tech companies are building are actually a good solution. Except all these tools have a "15 more minutes" button that takes less than 5 seconds to activate, so it's all kind of useless. These tools need to actually freeze you out for 5+ minutes before you get you get your next 15 minutes.
I think that having a government regulator mandate certain screen time controls for apps and devices could be an interesting solution. And having these systems be opt-in gets around first amendment concerns.
Of course, maybe this will just be the next GDPR cookie banner and turn out to be useless.
Having unsuccessfully tried to use those screen time controls, the two things that have worked better are:
1) A browser extension that forces me to stare at a boring page for 60 seconds before I can proceed to the blocked page, instead of blocking it outright. Since it's not a full block but just a wait, I'm less tempted to go and disable the extension or extend the time.
2) Better yet, a browser extension that just hides the algorithmic feeds of popular sites without affecting the rest of the site functionality. I can still read Reddit posts, watch YouTube videos, etc. if I get there from Google or a bookmark, but I don't even see the endless feed of temptation.
Basically, it's about breaking the dopamine loop the site creators have created rather than strict blocks of the whole thing.
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.
He changed his mind on this completely. In 2021 he said it would be underrated [https://www.slowboring.com/p/remote-work] because he thought it would further his goal of Make Hanging Out Great Again...but instead he doesn't like that people just use it to stay at home more. He also cited damage to productivity when I asked him a mailbag question on this back in 2022. [https://www.slowboring.com/p/house-of-the-mailbag]
I don't know if they've shared the precise arrangement, but Matt's mentioned walking to work a few times, and Halina has alluded to being in the office.
Also, does Matt just never play videogames? I'm not going to pretend it's the best use of anyone's time but there's loads of difference between doing that and watching short-form video (though this streaming thing seems a bit unhealthy at times; *watching* other people play except as a sort of tutorial is just a bit dystopian).
There is a good interview with YouTube CEO on NYT the daily podcast. Worth a listen. She repeatedly asks him about addiction and what they plan to do. He continually emphasizes improving parental control and making it more usable. I could see the interviewer was not satisfied with his answer but I thought it was worth pivoting on that point. If youtube is publicly stating that their plan for protecting kids involves better and easier to use parental controls that actually work, I think it is worth it for the public, the users, the media to push them forward on that. In the end I think the users themselves should be demanding they follow through on this since they seem realistically committed to it.
I disagree incredibly strongly on this take as well. I actually think this is a really great fit for legal enforcement. Any attempt to legislate behavior like this runs into edge cases. So you either have legislation which is incredibly heavy handed which bans lots of good behavior, or thousands of arcane rules and large incumbents can pay thousands of lawyers to figure out exactly what is allowed and thwart the rules.
Instead of you have a law that says "don't be evil", the companies which act the most evil get punished.
Personally, I’d rather lawyers and economist spend the next century trying to quantify the negative externalities of various segments of the digital economy than impose a vice tax on the entire internet.
It seems to me like the right thing to do here is higher marginal taxation on ads served to each user. A social media company making decreasing profits for each ad served to a given person meaningfully changes their incentives.
In a world where ads slowly decrease in value (and after a certain point, provide none), means you optimize for providing a high entertainment value early but not hooking users. It likely would come with a substantial total revenue reduction for these companies (implementation details matter for this ofc), but it could align them with delivering the kind of product people want
I'm willing to be the only person here who apparently agrees with Matt.
While there are certainly good ways to use a lot of data and bad ways to use very little, I suspect there is a correlation between amount of data used and "goodness" of internet usage: the median internet user would probably benefit from shifting some of their internet use from video to text. The median internet user would probably also benefit from just using the internet less overall.
(I think what Matt means is a data tax, not a bandwidth tax. Bandwidth is the rate of information transfer, data is the amount of data transferred.)
I took this idea probably a little too far, grading various internet activities on a social desirability score 1-10, plotting that against typical data usage, and calculating an r-squared. *If* you ignore video calling and educational/instructional video, there's some decent support for your idea. That "if" seems like a middle finger to introverted hobbyists, those underserved by local education systems, and anyone with loved ones living far away, though.
Yes, that was the whole point of the exercise: to actually explore what those tradeoffs are and spell them out, instead of assuming they aren't important.
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."
The whole Daley-finding-votes-in-cemeteries story is fun, but has been convincingly debunked. For one thing, votes in Southern Illinois (reliably Republican) came in after Chicago, meaning he could not have held Cook County's results until he knew how many votes he needed (which is central to the myth).
In 2000 there was a legitimate difference about who won depending on what vote-counting procedure was followed, etc. It’s like saying there’s no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit because lots of people file lawsuits.
Wtf did I just read? Yes, Jan 6 and hanging chads are different degrees of election interference. But political violence is a wildly different "kind" than procedural chicanery. One can be fought with words, the other demands blood and destroys a fundamental pillar of the state (monopoly on violence leading to peaceful transfer of power).
You really can't ignore the terroristic vandalism of the preceding few years, and act as if January 6th was some completely unprecedented action. Maybe once Monument Avenue is fully restored, we can agree that politically motivated vandalism is a bad thing. But at least for me not until then.
What violence are you referring to? (I don’t know where Monument Avenue is.) Was it undertaken in an attempt to reverse an election result? Was it the culmination of a long series of attempts, legal and illegal, to reverse an election result? Because if January 6 wasn’t unprecedented in the US I would definitely like to know about the precedents!
I always feel like I'm taking crazy pills when this comes up because I remember a big, big effort on the left to convince electoral college voters that they didn't have to vote for Donald Trump, actually, because something something content of character something something misinformation something something popular vote. How different is that than telling your party in the Senate that they shouldn't affirm the voting results?
Because what the Democrats asked for is legal, and within the original concept of the electoral college. There's actually an interstate compact that's trying to get every state to direct their electoral votes to the popular vote winner!
You can disagree with what the position taken, and that's fine, but it is in no way the same as January 6.
Did anyone *in the government* put pressure on the electors? For instance, did the president do this? Did Obama call up electors like Trump called senators and the Vice President?
Also, do you think that telling senators not to certify the EVs was the extent of Trump’s attempt to hold power? Trump *set up an alternate slate of electors*!
I mean, differences in degree matter. When committing the crime of assault, the sentencing judge is going to look at whether you merely pushed someone hard or beat the living crap out of them.
Not sure if I fully agree with you, but I encountered something relevant while listening to an audiobook on Martin Van Buren. Apparently his reaction to losing in 1840 was a lot closer to 2020 Donald Trump than you'd expect, at least in terms of rhetoric. Summarized by Claude:
Van Buren's own pre-election suspicions: Van Buren believed Whig rhetoric was the precursor of a massive conspiracy to steal the election. He wrote to Jackson of the potential vote fraud, warning "the mischief will be done before you are apprised of the danger," and initiated an election-eve investigation of previous state contests, trying to document Whig chicanery. Presidentprofiles
His reaction after losing: He called the election a "catastrophe," resulting from Whig fraud rather than Democratic collapse, writing to Andrew Jackson: "Time will unravel the means by which these results have been produced, and then the people will do justice to all." Encyclopedia.com
Contemporary newspaper allegations: A Democratic newspaper from October 1840 ran a front-page story headlined "INFAMOUS FRAUD EXPOSED," alleging that Whigs in New York were paying $30 per person to come to New York to vote in as many as five different districts. RareNewspapers.com
There are many, many parallels between Andrew Jackson and Trump - the populism, insecurity, creation of a new coalition, disfunctional cabinet, general air of conspiracy... I always read van Buren as more of a Rubio/Vance figure, the skilled politician that got swept up in populism.
Texas voter fraud, yeah Johnson totally did that in his 1948 Senate race: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal. Robert Caro notes that there was always plenty of vote-buying and ballot-stuffing in South Texas in that period, but LBJ took it to an unprecedented level.
Usually, when people talk about John F. Kennedy stealing an election, they're talking about Illinois in the 1960 presidential race.
Also, America by the 2010's/2020's was no longer the America of the 1960's. My parents were infants in 1960. Catholics were still often seen as weird. The mafia controlled Las Vegas and major parts of New York's economy. The Asian-American population was miniscule.
Sure. And I agree that Trump's lies and attempts to steal an election are bad, and IMHO make him unfit to be president and he should have been successfully impeached.
Just it's funny how much hate people have for Trump "trying" to steal an election, but JFK actually stealing one is fine for most people.
If we're having to reach back all the way before most adults were alive and before the post-Civil Rights Act realignment happened for an example, we're really stretching. America back then was much closer to being a developing country than America today. We were a poorer and less educated country. It doesn't excuse Kennedy's many crimes, but we were also a country that was still getting its shit together. Standards are higher now than for then.
Kennedy won Texas by about 45k votes in 1960 so the case that any fraud was determinative is less clear but George Parr was still around then and surely could've delivered whatever votes were needed lol.
I don’t think drsophilist was referring to the phone call, but to taking legal and illegal actions to overturn the result, culminating in mob violence.
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.
A lot of these lies probably filter up from the populace lying to itself up to those we elect as much as they come down from politicians at the top lying.
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.
Most democracies have politicians who lie. We live in an imperfect world. That doesn't mean that established democracies all inevitably result in someone like Trump.
A tax on net emissions (excise on the C content of fuels) would not impact any jobs in the oil and gas business for decades as development of nuclear and other technologies gradually make burning hydrocarbons relatively exensive way of doing things.
A tax would lower utilization of these fuels. You would see lower demand for petroleum products as the vehicle fleet turns over if you priced in the carbon externalities. Yes that would affect employment and investment in related industries.
The only way this doesn’t happen is if you have such a modest carbon tax that it doesn’t materially after consumers’ behaviors.
No, it influences the behavior, but over time. ICE, houses with furnaces phase out. Dometic use of coal goes away first, gas last. Excuse me if I implied zero effect.
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 even pretending your beliefs are more similar to the person you’re talking to than they might actually be is just normal social skills and trying to find common ground. Everyone does it in daily life and you’d have to be kind of autistic not to. It’s very different from lying about material facts.
I think "if you like your health care you can keep it" is a good example. It was a specific claim about the policies in the ACA, it was true, but it was interpreted more broadly in a way that couldn't possibly be true and then people were mad. That's really different from eg Elon saying that they had identified millions of dead people getting social security, which was not true _in the sense that Elon meant_.
Plus, something like 90% of people kept their healthcare after the ACA. Very few businesses were willing to drop benefits and shift employees to the exchanges to save money.
That’s not the complaint though. The complaint is that basically all of the insurance companies dropped the specific plans people were on and forced them in plans that either had much, much higher premiums or had astronomically higher deductibles and OOP maximums. The latter is what happened to me personally, such that the deductibles were so high that I functionally have only had insurance actually pay for something twice in the 15 years since the ACA passed.
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.
Trump believed it at the time. Although malignant narcissism combined with a pathological indifference to truth makes it possible to say and believe anything in the moment.
When did Trump start dropping the F-bomb? I feel like it wasn’t a thing during his first term. There was an incredibly minor scandal when Kamala said Fuck during an interview sometime in the 2010s (can’t find it because she said it during the 2024 campaign at a rally apparently). I imagine there would have been some coverage if he’d said it during that time
But the _content_ of Trumps lies are different, farther from relity than most other politicians.
And often the statement are not even lies. Biden probably really thought that ARA would "stiulate the economy." Trump may really think that allowing people who entered the US ilegally to stay is harmful in some way to non-"elite" people.
A lot of republicans want to help their constituents. Trump doesn’t care about his constituents, just about whether there are cameras watching him (and secondarily if anyone can lend him a few billion).
Whatever else one thinks of Nixon - and he was a paranoid criminal - he also had a strong and real desire to be seen by history as a statesman in the conventional Great Man mode, and he possessed a superior and cultivated, if flawed, intelligence, which he applied, particularly in his wilderness years in New York, but also in the first term, to figuring out how to do that. It is impossible to imagine, say, Trump getting through the first Viking Press translation of DeGaulle's multi-volume memoirs, interlining and jotting down marginal comments and questions as prompts for when he would next get to see the Great Man, as Nixon did. Nixon did damage, but we will be many many years rebuilding the wreckage after Trump, if our poor old republic is lucky enough even to survive in a reasonably evolved, democratic form.
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.
To fix the deficit we have to cut entitlements, raise taxes, or both. We've known that approximately forever.
We used to have one party that wanted to cut entitlements and one that wanted to raise taxes. Now we have two parties that promise not to do either of those things - or only to do them to someone else. One party wants to expand entitlements further and the other wants to cut taxes further. The voters like these plans much more than the old plans.
I honestly think Republicans have lost the capacity to write laws beyond tax cuts and military spending. What’s the last major non-tax bill they passed, No Child Left Behind?
More broadly, this has become harder to identify because Congress now rolls so much stuff into incredibly large bills instead of passing separate acts.
But its also very much in the eye of the beholder. I know some people who are convinced that bill will have a big impact, while others think it won't do almost anything.
If I was going to argue something, its the second point. OBBA was mostly a tax cut+ bill, but it had some other stuff in there that could be considered big - e.g. Trump accounts* for kids. But because it was all consolidated, most people don't know much about the details.
Not entirely, but as the discussion about whether Biden advanced Progressive goals reviewed, there are very different opinion on these things! Matt and Brian have a view that I think many others would dispute!
Didn’t Hochul and Newsom just unwind some environmental regulations in their respective states? They didn’t get thrown out of the party and in fact Newsom is the 2028 front runner. I’m not saying you’re not identifying a real problem, but maybe it’s less severe than you think.
The claim was, “A Democrat who suggested that we need to reform NEPA would probably become a heretic and be tossed from the Party.” Newsom and Hochul reformed environmental legislation in their respective states but are the opposite of tossed-from-the-party heretics.
"There is still no nationwide discussion of the looming insolvency of SS and Medicare and what to do about it."
Amusingly, the only time I've seen references to this from politicians was in *pro-Trump* mailers I got during 2024 that said that SS would cut benefits under Harris... 🤯
“Out of the half a million charging stations created by the IRA, I think 19 were actually built.”
This is just stupid. A quick Google search will tell you that 120 to 150 operational charging stations were built, and many more were going to be built (by the states, which is why the program moved slowly), before the program was halted by Trump. He illegally froze NEVI funding in January 2025 (much remains selectively blocked for blue states only) although some was unblocked by the courts. When illegally freezing funds stopped working, the administration then created a new set of 100% “buy American” rules (up from 55%) which makes it impossible to build any of the additional planned charging stations, since there are no 100% US-made chargers.
I don’t understand why anyone would think an effective sales pitch for their worldview would contain facts that are so verifiably at odds with reality.
you said 120 to 150, the article says about 60. When I had originally looked up how many had been built it was 19. I picked the article because it was in 2024, the time of the election. My point was that we still cannot build anything.
You may think 60 or even 150 is a great job. You would have a different opinion of what success is.
The number I gave you is current as of today. The money wasn’t lost or wasted, as you apparently believe. It was delivered as a reimbursement plan through the states, which meant that states first needed to plan the deployments and only afterwards would a single dollar of Federal money flow to them. Because of this structure and the need for a nationwide standard, it took much longer for builds to happen than it should have. And of course once the buildouts started to happen at a more rapid clip in late 2024, Trump illegally withheld the money (until he lost in court) and now he’s trying other tactics to make building with that money impossible. That money will probably end up getting stolen for direct payments to the Trump organization and other cronies, while idiots complain about Biden wasting it or some other misinformed ignorant nonsense.
You can criticize the Biden administration for going through the states, and the delays that produced (I’m with you, that was a real opportunity cost, but also give your alternative plan!) But if your pitch is “here is my world view, I will try to convince you along the way that this NEVI money was wasted or stolen by Biden, when it wasn’t” then people are going to fact check you. The chargers didn’t cost unreasonable amounts of money; payments were only allocated when chargers were built; that money wasn’t wasted. The goal was to build out a US capability to manufacture half a million highly-specialized pieces of tech, which takes time and required a guaranteed multi-year source of funding. NEVI was a pretty good way to do that, and was basically murdered before it could produce that capability. But by all means let’s moan about how we can’t build things, while dancing on the grave of attempts to actually build that capability.
I don’t I said anything about waste. It is the incompetence of our government and our system of NIMBY and lawsuit that stop us from building anything in a timely fashion. You want to know another problem? All the DEI contraction policy BS it screwed up everything in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. I said at the time that NIMBY lawsuits Indian burial grounds whatever would be impossible to build 500,000 charging stations. Impossible. I am proven correct in that.
I met Sir John Major in the early 2000s, shortly after he'd lost the 1997 UK General Election in a landslide and was regarded as a stiff, robotic, grey politician with no charisma.
He was the most charismatic and persuasive person in the room and positively lit up the room with his personality.
There are very few politicians for whom that is not true.
The only senior politician I've ever met that I'd say that about is Liz Truss, who really is as stiff and artificial in person as she seems in public.
Yes, and performers are on another level. Ricky Gervais has built a whole career on supposedly being ugly. I saw him once on the street and he was quite good-looking. I remember Tony Kornheiser saying how awful it was to be on television next to Jimmy Smits. Supposedly even movie stars didn't want to be photographed beside Keanu Reaves when he was young.
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.
“They are going to understand that Democrats don’t like to be mean to sympathetic people, but that realistically the only way to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control is — yes — to frankly and unapologetically turn away people who are in fact not rapists or murderers or terrorists but just basically normal people who simply don’t have permission to move to the United States.”
It is not mean to turn someone away when they get here, or even shortly after, if they don’t have a credible asylum claim or lawful grounds to be in the United States. It may be disappointing for those people, but it is not cruelty to turn them away.
It is mean to tacitly accept them coming here, working, building a life and a family, and then telling them to leave.
For example, our asylum system must be faster to avoid this outcome. Claims should be processed in a matter of a few months, not 5 years.
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.
Is that true? Basically all of the semiconductor money is allocated to specific projects now, it only hasn't paid out because it pays out in stages.
TSMC's first Arizona fab is open, two more are going to open. Micron's massive expansions are almost done. The big Samsung fab in Texas is going to be done this year.
It kind of just sounds like you're blaming the government for the fact that Intel is a disaster company that is structurally incapable of making good choices.
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.
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 was there in 2003 for much of the summer in a scouting exchange and the Midlands felt comparable to SE PA, albeit with smaller housing. My middle class host family, with a single earner in a job comparable to my dad’s, owned many of the same things and enjoyed most of the same leisure. The fact that my host friend and I were able to hop on buses to get around Darby alone at 12 was awesome.
Every time I’ve been back since the gap in material standards of living seems to yawn wider, and when I hear professional class British coworkers discuss the challenges they face it just seems depressing.
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.
>In the states between SSA/Medicare/Medicaid and private health insurance we end up paying a similar amount for better care<
"We end up paying a similar amount" is a stretch. While the *percentage* is about the same, far higher unit prices mean total out of pocket costs average 3x-5x higher in the US. However, those higher costs probably do buy some advantages (shorter waits, private rooms, more diagnostic screening options) and Americans are more affluent. But for low income people not covered by reasonably robust public programs, healthcare in the US is inaccessible in a way that isn't the case in Britain.
Basically, the US screws itself in terms of how much it spends on healthcare, but all that extra spending does buys some advantages (just not enough to justify the six point of GDP premium), while access remains terribly uneven.
Yes the % is what I mean. We pay more with the same % because we earn more, costs are not decoupled from wages, precisely the opposite due to baumol effects of wages and glut in amount of people working in the space v. other industries.
Low income people are absolutely covered by a variety of overlapping public programs. The completely uninsured are the ones left out, but medicaid is extraordinarily generous. Medicare Advantage was so generous that it led to insurers backing out because they couldnt make the math work. SNAP and EITC have grown considerably. The only catch to all of this is essentially work requirements. You have to have a job of some kind, or be seeking one actively, to qualify for a lot of the generous benefits. Good stuff here to read through it all - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/changes-in-the-safety-net-over-recent-decades-and-their-impact/
Yeah, but work requirements are shit. The Medicaid population just isn’t gonna do that. If you work the amount of hours they require at an actual job, you no longer qualify for Medicaid. And volunteering? Give me a break. Are they setting people up with volunteer hours? They want people to do *that* 20 hours a week?!? People who are outside the economy? And don’t get me started on the “must apply for 3 jobs a week” rule that folks game by applying for nuclear engineer and CxO jobs while living in their grandma’s basement. Those rules are part of what’s ruining capitalism by forcing the AI screening of bullshit online job applications because I have to imagine there are a whole lot of swine you gotta dig through to find a pearl.
Luckily this seems to be another thing handled by the states. I reckon
I agree work requirements can be onerous. But the opposite is also bad. There doesnt seem to be a great option here without a boilerplate "must be seeking work if able" where "if able" does an extremely large amount of subjective heavy lifting. Too lax and state coffers are destroyed and you end up (like NYC) spending more per homeless person than the average wage earner takes in annually. Too stringent (like Arkansas) and you get too many people kicked off coverage, leading to higher rates of delayed care and rationing of medications for chronic conditions, so the costs end up getting eaten by emergency room visits that end up being more expensive overall. It's a fine line to thread.
I think it would just be best to require token copays for Medicaid services. Doesn’t have to be a lot and obviously you wouldn’t do that for patients in institutions, which we should have a lot more of, but just charging folks a buck or two for things would reduce a fair amount of spend bc people waste that which is free
The transit issue isn’t one about personal spending. It’s just a kind of option that no amount of money can buy in the United States. There just isn’t a way for me to get into Los Angeles or San Diego without being stuck in traffic, or spending half an hour getting to the nearest train station.
Actually, in Los Angeles, for several decades there were fire codes that required every tall building to have a helipad on top. (There was a fire at the Aon building in dtla in the 80s where some people evacuated by helicopter because the stairs were obstructed.) As a result, the skyline has lots of flat tops, and you probably could get between century city and dtla by helicopter. But there’s no good landing sites in Orange County as far as I know.
As a resident Europoor here, one of the many reasons I'd never consider emigrating to the US (other than the obvious stuff, like family), is how unsafe the US seems. This is not only via reporting, but every time I go on holiday in the US or my friends do we trade stories of witnessing crazy stuff on public transport, seeing people doing drugs in the street, turning around a corner and feeling really unsafe. You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US, and you are more likely to die younger in the US, even if you are rich!
Also your education system is awful.
I think most Brits would prefer Australia as more culturally similar, safer and also with much higher salaries.
I can control whether or not I get an air conditioner (we have one!), I can't control whether I get run over by a giant SUV, or being a victim of crime.
From here it seems that the best of the US higher education system is only accessible if you pay for private primary and secondary education or have a compelling personal sob story for a good admissions essay. In the UK just have to get good exam results, which as a parent is a much less stressful proposition.
In any case, US life expectancy is much lower than UK life expectancy, wealthy Americans live less long than poor Brits. I am not trading 10 years of life so I can afford a new iPhone every year.
I already can afford a new iPhone tbh - the other factor here is that as a relatively high income Brit (like that police officer!), I have a good quality of life, with savings, property, holidays. Even if I didn't have family tying me here, I'm not sure what the extra money would buy me that I'd actually want. I'm already not spending most of my salary! I'd certainly get less holidays in the US and they'd be more expensive.
I'd probably get a larger, nicer house, although getting the equivalent of what I have in London on a comparable US city wouldn't be possible IMO.
The US has far hotter weather in many places during the summer. The rampant deaths are just as much of a policy choice.
Our flagship state colleges which are extremely affordable for in-state residents are far better than their European counterparts. At the higher end of elite colleges student aid is extremely generous. Life expectancy is lower because of obesity, a problem of abundance and lifestyle not of want and need like heat death.
Life expectancy in the US lower due to drug deaths, obesity and car deaths. You can opt out of that culture only so much, and I don't want those risks for my children. You can't fully opt out of car crashes/pedestrian deaths. You can't fully opt out of a medical culture that over prescribes pain killers.
Yes, deaths to heat are a policy choice. But a policy choice I can personally avoid, whereas I can't really influence whether or not a giant American HGV is going to kill me while I drive (even by the very best defensive driving!).
The US has a fantastic economy and entrepreneurs and amazing scientific research, but that wasn't my point at all - my point was that US college admissions is not based on how good you are, it's based on how compelling you can be in a personal essay. Stressful stuff - much easier to have a clear system where externally assessed academic performance is the most important metric.
Even getting into those flagships can be difficult - anyway are they that good? Didn't the University of San Diego reveal that a significant proportion of their incoming 1st year class couldn't even do basic maths? A British 11 year old could do better than many new UCSD undergrads.
The crime and disorder are definitely an issue if you want to live in most major cities compared to Europe (though negligible in many suburbs and some states like the northern interior).
What’s your issue with the education system? It varies a lot by state, but US PISA scores aren’t dramatically worse than other OECD countries.
They're worse than the UK where I live, and getting into a good US uni is decoupled from academic performance in a way that makes it very stressful for parents. And my impression is that US has a lot more tech in the classrooms and much lower academic standards, because there are no external examinations to keep schools honest. I prefer the European standard of measuring performance by external assessments.
"getting into a good US uni is decoupled from academic performance"
This isn't true in my experience, at least for a regular person (no legacy admissions or special talents). Getting into UC Davis or University of Texas or Carnegie Mellon is pretty straightforward, although it takes pretty hard work.
Perhaps the difference you're thinking of is that you can do well in the US and then it's a crapshoot which two of the five similarly ranked universities actually accept you, but going to one specific university doesn't matter much anyway.
>You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US, and you are more likely to die younger in the US<
This is not so. Homicide is obviously a lot more common in the United States than in other rich countries, but even in the US it's still thankfully a very rare occurrence, and rapidly growing ever rarer.
To put it another way, about one American in 25,000 gets murdered each year. And the odds are (far) lower still for people not personally involved in criminal activity (which presumably includes nearly all tourists).
And yes, "crime" in general—including violent crime—doesn't appear to be higher in the United States than in other rich countries.
>Also your education system is awful.<
Based on what? Our huge share of Nobel prizes? Our ability to be 40% richer than you?
It is so! It's rare in the US and it's much rather than the UK.
Education in primary and secondary schools worse than UK based on Pisa, Timss, PIRLS. Your best universities are only accessible with a compelling sob story or if you are a "legacy", or if you come from a top US private school.
As a parent, the UK system is much less stressful. Just get your kids good examination results. It's all very transparent and clear. US seems to be random and hard to predict.
US is a big rich country with lots of immigrants and you definitely don't need me!
Your statement above that "You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US" is almost certainly false. The gold standard, most comprehensive cross-country comparison of crime victimization shows the US to be middle of the pack among high income countries:
I mean you're not really responding to my points here. Yes, Britain is doing badly economically. But it has a better education system, better educated citizens and a much less intensive parenting culture. There are lots of Brits who'd love the US, but for most of us we don't like the culture. Brits prefer to emigrate to Australia. Although having said that of my friends, all the emigrants (all men!) live in the US, all three of them. All Cambridge graduates actually!
Looking at how many Americans die violently, and die at all, America is dead last. You have the worst life expectancy, and personally I like living. And yes, that low life expectancy extends to rich Americans too.
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.
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.
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…
The disparity really is shocking. I worked for a mid sized European tech company for 4 years in a legal role and made more than our general counsel and most of the leadership team. It’s not hard to see why European tech companies are so far behind.
It may not be even, but for those on the lower end of the pay scale, the lack of a safety net in the US is scary. It may be why so many young people say they would rather take the low wages in return for a better safety net as protection. Maybe it is because I spend much of my time with households that make less than $50,000, but I would probably prefer this trade-off. Our rich are much richer in the US, but at some point, that doesn't really matter to those on the low end. It may even make people more resentful than they would be in a society with more compressed incomes.
I feel like this ignores the considerable safety net we *do* have, particularly in blue states and cities. I'm in NYC. Half the city is on Medicaid. That's free health care, completely free. And higher quality than the NHS. A quarter of the city is on SNAP, having their grocery bills significantly defrayed. Between rent stabilization, city-owned housing, and Section 8, about a third of the city is paying well below market rents.
These are just a handful of programs. There is a safety net in this country.
But if you are in the situation where, for instance, you aren't eligible for Medicaid, but your deductible is $10,000, you are in a bad spot in the US. Most medical bankruptcies are people with insurance but high premiums, deductibles, and copays. Medical bankruptcies are practically unheard of elsewhere. People in their 20s talk about health insurance way more than I ever remember doing. It weighs heavily on people. So even if we improve the safety net in other areas, if we do not change our health insurance system, life will feel very financially precarious for many.
I am surprised to hear that about a third of the city is paying below market rents, I just checked the waiting lists, and the average wait is four years and three months for subsidized housing in NYC, which is substantially better than I thought. I am now curious what rent level I would qualify for.
My understanding is that medical bankruptcies are vastly overstated. From what I recall, the numbers are often juiced by counting any bankruptcy for which medical bills were included, even if they weren't the precipitating factor.
Perhaps bankruptcies are rare, but about 1/3 of households have medical debt - medical bills that they can't pay on time or end up putting on a credit card that they can't pay the full balance on. I do not recommend the latter, as I recently learned that any health bills paid by credit card are not eligible for medical debt relief, at least in New York State.
Yes in blue states the safety net is reasonable. It’s not the only, but a major, consideration for why we live in WA. It is good to know that we will have healthcare if our jobs are lost, and it is good that my husband has a union so the former won’t happen.
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.
Related, seems wild to me that you have to wait a minimum of four years before becoming a sergeant in the DC police. Seems like the police equivalent of occupational licensing. Surely someone will chime in with a “but actually you do need that much time to be worth promoting” to which I say either you clearly have limited experience with how jobs work, your talent pool sucks, or your talent development program sucks. And they’re not mutually exclusive!
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!
In Boston the party used to stop at 12:30 because that's when the T stopped (and who wants to pay for an Uber). Now the T runs until 1:30. It's still dumb because the bars close at 2, but it's progress!
Ugh, yes. I have never been a partyer, and even this nerdy native Bostonian remembers plenty of times running to catch the last train. 12:30 was so early. Glad they have at least changed it to 1:30.
When I was partying in GA and FL (late 90's to early 2000's) We just went to the after party club after the regular clubs shut down at 2:00 AM
In particular I can remember leaving an after party in Atlanta at 1 PM or so the next day. More common was going home between 6 AM and 8 AM. The good thing about that was all the cops had gone home and were no longer looking for you.
In my college the party started as soon as Friday classes ended at 4pm which meant that most people were asleep or passed out by 11pm which was amazing.
Oooh, Maine content. What I live for. As a Mainer who is left enough to have gone to see David Sedaris at Merril earlier this week, but also right wing enough to be mad at Sedaris for saying Eventide is the best restaurant in the world (not even the best oysters on that side of Portland; fight me tourists), my take is that Platner brings a few things.
1) The whole political outsider persona is quite appealing. We're in a place where insider v. outsider is a much bigger deal than left v. right, and Platner plays that hard in a ways Mills (and hopefully, Collins) have no real defense against. Mills' most effective attack ad was completely undermined when it came out the women in it were all Democratic party operatives. Bad look.
2) Maine Dems are tired of getting kicked around by Collins, and have made the sensible choice too many times. A high variance option seems more plausible then running the obvious choice. Collins has been out-performing Republicans in the state so long, by so much, that it feels like there's nothing left to do but gamble.
3) big strong arms that i want to hold me
4) Matt's right about the more liberal shift Maine has taken, but that shift is almost entirely driven by the the much more urban southern part of the state. Platner reads as both an authentic Mainer to them, and clearly not a member of the southern Maine bourgeoise that have run the Democratic party for ... Ever? So I think this hope is that Platner reads to lower information voters are being authentically Maine, despite being the representative of those southern Mainers (and people from away we have somehow allowed to move in).
I'm also a Mainer, and generally pretty skeptical about progressives, but I'll vote for Platner in the primaries. Mills can absolutely not beat Collins. It's too easy for voters to blame her for everything they don't like about the state. The big question is whether Platner does read as authentic to the voters in the north and west who are not strongly affiliated. Collins has some rock-solid support there. Nevertheless, I absolutely agree that Platner can capitalize on his outsider status with some of these voters and that may succeed. In that respect, the tattoo and Reddit post stuff kind of works for him. He's not a Nazi, obviously, but he has fucked up in various macho ways in the past, which marks him as clearly not a processed, synthetic Democratic establishment product.
It's an easy choice for me, given that Mills can't beat Collins. But there is this other upside, which is that if Platner loses, I can fling that in the face of all my Bernie fanatic friends who insist that if the Dems just ran truly progressive candidates, they would win because there's all this covert support for their policies out there, just waiting to activated. At this point, I can't even be sure they're wrong, given how weird the political landscape has become.
That said, while the guy is a genuinely gifted campaigner, he is also kind of an idiot--the tattoo is an unforced error--and will have no idea what he's doing if he gets to the Senate. Mills without a doubt would be a more effective legislator. Still, she can't win and he might, and getting rid of Collins would be worth it.
Oh, and in my experience, Mainers--maybe not in Portland, but I live in midcoast--absolutely hate domestic migration. People from away buying up houses (especially if they only occupy them seasonally) is the No. 1 thing they blame for the cost of housing. Also, there are relatively few tradesmen, so it's difficult to get any work done and when you do, it's very expensive, and this is also blamed on rich people "from away." People move here to get away from it all, and they bitch incessantly about the traffic during the summer and how much they hate tourists. Maine really needs more jobs, though why the people complaining about this don't become carpenters or electricians when there is such a shortage of those, I don't know. The complaint that younger people can't get a foothold in the housing market is common across the nation, but here it is always blamed on rich seasonal home buyers, retirees, and real estate investors turning homes into AIR B&Bs. IDK now true that is, but you can't blame people for getting mad when they live in towns where they can't afford a house yet there are houses sitting empty everywhere 9 months of the year.
If you insist on staying in the Old Port? Honestly, I like Hunt and Alpine but the rest of the menu there has a tendency to soften my opinions. Scales feels trite to say, but they’re fantastic, obviously. The real place, in the Old Port, would be Bread and Friends. But travel down to Washington and visit The Shop, or Wayside Tavern up in the Arts District. Or, even better, Lady Shuckers if you can stand the indignity of setting foot in (shudder) South Portland.
I don’t generally don’t stay in Portland at all anymore, except maybe at the Hilton Garden Inn at PWM to catch an early morning flight out. (Last time I was at Eventide was late January last year - a couple days after the airplane-helicopter crash at DCA. Dropped my rental, and then found my flight—all flights—to DCA were cancelled. Turns out it’s dirt cheap to stay in the Old Port on a Friday night in January. Fore Street wasn’t busy at all: no wait for a table, but my wife didn’t like what they were serving. So Eventide.)
I agree, BTW, with your terse analysis of the north-south divide. I grew up in Maine. I go back a lot, and have spent a lot of time over the years in places like Portland and Ogunquit, and also in places like Skowhegan. The divergence of wealth and politics is right out in the open for all to see, if they look. Not a lot of doublewides on Munjoy Hill and not a lot of pride flags flying in Somerset County.
If you had gone to Fore Street that night we could have had dinner together (:.
My mother was from Maine, and that side of my family is still mostly there. Almost the only time we stay in Portland is winter, specifically the end of January for my birthday. Restaurants are all available.
Funny what you say about Munjoy Hill. That's where my mother grew up, and even into my early adulthood it was mostly blue collar. During one trip to see my grandmother late in her life, my BIL and I seriously considered buying one of the big multifamily homes right on the Promenade. Neither of us had the appetite for risk that would have taken, but man I look back today and think I could cut a couple years off my work life if we had done it.
I'm perplexed by what you mean about the Polish regime not being strong enough to crack down on Solidarity without Warsaw Pact assistance in 1981. The whole point of martial law (according to its authors) was to avoid foreign intervention, and as a matter of historical fact it was imposed entirely by the Polish military. I think you may have your facts backwards on this one.
Yes, I was perplexed by that too. AFAIK Jaruzelski’s message was “if I hadn’t imposed martial law, the Soviets would have rolled in and everything would have gone to hell.”
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.
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.
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.
A friend of mine forwarded an announcement that the US Park Police were offering a hiring bonus of $70,000. My response was "Yeah, but then I'd have to move to DC."
It's also a bit misleading to talk about salaries without taking into account costs. The disposable income differences, adjusted for cost of living, may not be as large as current salary differences imply.
> 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.
I think people might be more fond of our police if we called them something cute and anachronistic like Scotland Yard, too, which makes me think of a Scotty dog. Who doesn’t like Scotty dogs?
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.
Except no dem is talking about deficit reduction, I think both parties will wait until the last second to fix any debt issues and we all are going to pay the price for that.
Thank you. The difference between Biden's "overspending" and not overspending was the US having 10% inflation and 7% inflation. Not to mention that our GDP gains and economy were WAY better than other rich countries exiting the COVID crisis. I think people are overstating the harm of Biden's agenda.
Maybe but only because people couldn’t understand anything other than “all this inflation is Biden’s fault.” Companies were absolutely price gouging and consumers just submitted to it while blaming Biden. Also the bird flu causing the deaths of millions of chickens which made egg prices shoot up. Not to mention labor shortages and ye olde supply-chain issue. (Could throw in meat packing monopolies though they weren’t caused by the pandemic).
How to message complexity to the American voter? You can’t (a perennial problem for Democrats), so it had to be Biden and Harris’s fault, end of story. But we who are interested in and can cogitate on complexity ought not be saying that.
I think the bigger problem with both Trump and Biden’s pandemic stimulus spending was the blatant and widespread PPP fraud, not so much the stimmy checks to people. An extra thousand bucks to individuals really just isn’t that much money
It was only going to be inflation generating if the Fed went along with it. If Powell has said "hey this is likely to be inflationary, time to raise rates" a year earlier as many were advocating for then a lot of this pain could have been avoided.
I can only imagine the backlash that the Fed would have gotten had they preemptively raised rates at a time when Congress was passing stimulus spending bills to avoid a recession. Democrats would have been howling for their heads.
Around 2010 the Detroit Medical Center (DMC) was sold to Tenet which is a for profit health system. I saw the hospital CEO, Mike Duggan, give two presentations about the sale to two very different groups. He is now the mayor of Detroit and currently running for Governor of Michigan
His presentation to local citizens painted DMC as being in dire financial straights that need to be sold to avoid cutting employees and services. He had to sell them on this being a necessity and scare them with the dire consequences to their lives if the sale was not approved. Part of that was driven around the laws around selling a non-profit to a for-profit entity.
His presentation to a group of health care lawyers painted DMC has rebounding and growing and the sale as a means to accelerate that growth and turn the hospital into a world class hospital. He wanted his peers to see that he was a great CEO who had saved DMC and was prepared to lead it in this new era of growth.
Anyway, it was eye opening to see the same person give the same presentation with the same slides and sell two completely different t stories. Politicians are wild.
Was he lying in either case, or just giving different interpretations and possibilities to the same set of underlying facts?
John from FL argued that all politicians are lying. The thread is too long for me to get involved, but I think this is an illustration of the difference between Trump lying and other politicians persuading different people to the same result but appealing to their own differing underlying motivations. Assuming he wasn't just outright lying.
I mean I think it’s hard to take the position that the hospital was in decline and that it was bouncing back without one of them being a lie. That said, my takeaway wasn’t so much that he was lying as it was your point at the end of your post. It’s not as if he used different financial numbers, he just emphasized different points in time to build a narrative that he felt best served his desired outcome given the audience.
I was almost certainly the only person who attended both talks and it has served as a good reminder to me when listening to any advocate. It’s always good to question something when it’s likely exactly what you want to hear or at least what the speaker/writer thinks it’s exactly what you want to hear.
Agreed on Duggan. Hard to argue against the turnaround in Detroit. As long as it’s not the guy bragging about castrating pigs I think Michigan will end up with a pretty solid Governor. Gilchrist seems competent and has been part of a largely competent Whitmer administration.
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.
> 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.
Reading the responses below…am I the only one who gets nothing but medication ads for conditions I don’t have? (Or do I? Does the algorithm know something I don’t?)
I get a disturbing number of schizophrenia medication ads for someone who has never been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
OR DO YOU
Cue VSauce music
"How do you know you don't have [condition]? Ask your doctor about [medication] today!"
That parenthetical sounds way too plausible, like a great Black Mirror episode or an unpublished Philip K Dick novel.
It would be a dark irony if frontier AI labs thew everything they had at diagnostic inference and made steady but unexciting progress, while YouTube and co started predicting rare disorders with super-clinical accuracy between TurboTax and political ads.
I receive a disturbing number of Ebay ads for replica "Marshal of France" batons.
"How do you know you don't have [condition]? Ask your doctor about [medication] today!"
I only get ads for things I already bought. Not a big problem, though; after five years, the ads tend to go away.
IMO yes.
I’m more likely to buy something I see in an instructional video on YouTube than anything that has been out in a formal advertising channel by a wild margin.
Google should have more than enough info to barrage me with ads for good whiskey and wine, high quality cookware, home improvement equipment or tools, international travel, and non-fiction books.
I get virtually none of those.
Whiskey and table saws seems like a well-rounded life.
Whiskey and table saws, it's a winning combination!
*Ultra-fine print disclaimer: recommended temporal distance between whiskey and table saw use may vary by individual, consult with your physician before using whiskey and table saws.
I will assume the war crime-level pun was unintentional, haha.
I've observed the same thing. I wonder if the poor targeting is because google/facebook/etc. don't do a good job or if the relevant companies aren't paying for that type of targeted advertising. E.g. if I watch a cooking video on YouTube, it is often sponsored by some company selling cookware, so they can target advertising very directly that way instead of paying google (and some youtubers are very slick at putting ads into their videos).
Oh, definitely some of that, but I’ve used google to go dig into a bunch of stuff that indicates obvious commercial interest and gotten nary a baited hook dangled in front of me.
I once spent hours over the course of a week reading up on high-carbon stainless alloys and case hardening from a dozen websites specializing in high end knives and forums on making knives.
Never once do I recall seeing an advertisement for chef’s knives of any grade in the following six or eight months.
This was in 2018; I bought a set of “prosumer” knives from a manufacturer in my wife’s hometown when we visited that year.
Amazon subsequently decided, in the last six months, that I must be interested in knives on the basis of having bought a seasoning blend for cast iron.
It’s just insanely inept, from my perspective.
You're doing something wrong. Most, or at least a good many, of the ads I get are for boat parts and woodworking tools. Have you seen all the cool new jigs for cabinet hardware?
I’m *quite ok* with the ads being useless gibberish.
Yeah, I've had the same experience on YouTube. The ads I've seen are poorly targeted, which is baffling considering how much information they have about me.
My positive experiences have mostly been on Instagram.
Well, I don’t have any social media accounts other than this and (laughs until unable to breathe) LinkedIn.
But I’ve never noted any ad-targeting on any platform that actually felt like they were presenting something that I want, not just YouTube.
And my tastes are not *so* esoteric as to be unfulfillable. Merely normal levels of odd.
Yeah, to be clear, I've never felt well-targeted on any platform, except Instagram.
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.
Adblock is my friend, it just keeps me blissfully unaware of what ads are being targeted to me.
I'm a Ghostery man myself. Seems to work great with Safari, anyway.
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.
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.
Were you using their wifi?
Probably Alexa hearing the clack of the balls.
That would be my first bet too.
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.
I never quite hated ads, because I didn't feel strong emotions about them, but until a year ago, I just considered them obstacles.
This is pretty weird territory for me and so far specific to Instagram (YouTube's ads don't get it done). Often enough now, I see something that might solve a problem or is delightful in some way, so I open the link in a browser tab to review later. The ratio of content to ads is getting bad enough that I'm starting to use it less, but that's a different problem.
Interesting! I also dislike IG so that might explain a lot
I can see how IG could be a hellscape: "Facebook, but with less text!" sounds like a satirical pitch for the world's worst app.
But I have several different accounts (for art, music, and my personal life), and somehow all three remain mostly compelling. I estimate I see 50% accounts I follow, 25% recommendations, and 25% advertisements. If the ads and recs get even a little worse, my usage will drop fast.
I like it when I travel and see ads for sites or events where I am. That's how I discovered the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. I never would have guessed that such a great little professional theater would be located on the ultra-touristy Navy Pier. Recommend!
Exactly! I don't want to oversell my enthusiasm, but to put things in Slow Boring terms, the product discovery has, on occasion, given me a genuine consumer surplus!
The Chicago theater and classical-music scenes are literally the only things I miss about my dreary years as a twentysomething dot-com employee in the Loop.
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.
Back before I paid for YouTube premium, their ads ping-ponged wildly between thinking I was either a rightwing gun nut guy or a lesbian Latina.
Or the ads I get for hair straightener when my natural hair couldn't get any straighter.
Small sample but that seems pretty good! If you believe that advertising can be positive-sum at all then showing users ~40% well-targeted ads is not a small economic gain relative to basically-untargeted linear television advertising. (And if you don’t believe advertising can be positive-sum at all, why stop at banning targeted ads?)
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 mean that's the problem, right? The ads work well, which means they make a lot of money, which means there's a big pot of money to sustain the overall ecosystem
Yeah, I agree that banning targeted advertisement would hurt the big internet companies, but the part I was responding to was "no one likes it."
Oh I see what you mean. I read that as saying "no one likes" that this is the only policy that will work but I think you're right, he was claiming that nobody likes targeted ads, which is wrong. Though I guess if you asked people they'd say they don't like targeted ads, but their revealed preference is different.
Instagram specifically really has my number in a way the other providers don't. They can microtarget not just 'art supplies' but 'art supplies of the specific kind Kade was already thinking of buying', it's really baffling.
I completely agree. Every time I'm watching some sporting event that's got mass-market ads, it's much less relevant to me. I don't have moderate to severe ulcerative colitis (which is roughly half of Rx ads it seems), but I could probably be talked into buying a new fleece from REI via those targeted ads!
"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.
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.
I heard someone say, maybe even on this forum, would you rather have untargeted ads?
Do companies really spend less money on advertising today than they used to, or is it just the fewer channels available to them? Newspapers and magazines were always mostly ads, they just weren't near monopolies.
I suspect that social media financed by untargeted ads would still be profitable. And the incentives would still be in place to drive engagement.
If you just want to take a shot at big tech, raise their taxes, at least then you get some public good out of it.
A lot depends on what you mean by "targeted" -- all advertising is targeted in some sense, and always has been (buyers pick the channels they want to buy inventory from based on their audience). I suspect what you mean is "individually targeted". And here the evidence is that the biggest companies are actually in the best position to survive, because they have enough data to make excellent probabilistic bets about what to show you even without individually tracking you. See Eric Seufert's writing on Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative for more on this.
With that said I agree with the upstream point about bandwidth being a bad proxy for the externalities of digital consumption. This not only makes it an awkward remedy, but invites bad politics for getting anything enacted. Do you really want Netflix lobbying against you when you were trying to go after Meta and Tiktok?
For better or worse we already know what the path forward on this looks like, and it's embedded in the original mailbag question: it's age-gating these resources. Plenty of states are pursuing it, iterating the policy as courts raise objections. We have existence proofs of it working, despite civil society groups' best efforts to pretend otherwise. The politics are good--the only people who object to it either can't vote, are industry shills, or are so completely and appallingly fried by digital addiction that their continued proselytizing does more to hurt than help their cause (cf Taylor Lorenz). And fundamentally "think of the children" wins over "don't tread on me". I think we'll wind up with fairly wide-ranging bans/a version of COPPA that's actually enforced, then revisit when the generation that comes of age under more restrictive conditions experiences corporations abruptly lunging for their nucleus accumbens the day they turn 18.
I doubt it's *clearly* permissible as a law given the supreme court's recent commercial speech cases. Particularly if it's explicitly designed as a way to crush social media companies. This is one reason to favor taxes over bans.
I think it would be hard to ban buying targeted ads but easy to ban selling them. Facebook does not have a speech interest in their ad platform.
Moody v Netchoice (2024) strongly implied there is at least some first amendment interest in curating the news feed, although there was disagreement among the conservatives and the case is ongoing. It's definitely an open question and it probably won't turn on a buyer/seller distinction.
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...
Everyone is overthinking this. Just tax content that I don't like and think is bad for people.
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.
Matt undervaluing DIY videos on YouTube explains his positive impression of a bandwidth tax AND why he still hasn't fixed his door.
I think the screen time controls that tech companies are building are actually a good solution. Except all these tools have a "15 more minutes" button that takes less than 5 seconds to activate, so it's all kind of useless. These tools need to actually freeze you out for 5+ minutes before you get you get your next 15 minutes.
I think that having a government regulator mandate certain screen time controls for apps and devices could be an interesting solution. And having these systems be opt-in gets around first amendment concerns.
Of course, maybe this will just be the next GDPR cookie banner and turn out to be useless.
Having unsuccessfully tried to use those screen time controls, the two things that have worked better are:
1) A browser extension that forces me to stare at a boring page for 60 seconds before I can proceed to the blocked page, instead of blocking it outright. Since it's not a full block but just a wait, I'm less tempted to go and disable the extension or extend the time.
2) Better yet, a browser extension that just hides the algorithmic feeds of popular sites without affecting the rest of the site functionality. I can still read Reddit posts, watch YouTube videos, etc. if I get there from Google or a bookmark, but I don't even see the endless feed of temptation.
Basically, it's about breaking the dopamine loop the site creators have created rather than strict blocks of the whole thing.
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
He changed his mind on this completely. In 2021 he said it would be underrated [https://www.slowboring.com/p/remote-work] because he thought it would further his goal of Make Hanging Out Great Again...but instead he doesn't like that people just use it to stay at home more. He also cited damage to productivity when I asked him a mailbag question on this back in 2022. [https://www.slowboring.com/p/house-of-the-mailbag]
I don't know if they've shared the precise arrangement, but Matt's mentioned walking to work a few times, and Halina has alluded to being in the office.
Nah, just meet with the President in the Oval Office, bring him a gold bar, and ask for a special exemption for your company.
Also, does Matt just never play videogames? I'm not going to pretend it's the best use of anyone's time but there's loads of difference between doing that and watching short-form video (though this streaming thing seems a bit unhealthy at times; *watching* other people play except as a sort of tutorial is just a bit dystopian).
There is a good interview with YouTube CEO on NYT the daily podcast. Worth a listen. She repeatedly asks him about addiction and what they plan to do. He continually emphasizes improving parental control and making it more usable. I could see the interviewer was not satisfied with his answer but I thought it was worth pivoting on that point. If youtube is publicly stating that their plan for protecting kids involves better and easier to use parental controls that actually work, I think it is worth it for the public, the users, the media to push them forward on that. In the end I think the users themselves should be demanding they follow through on this since they seem realistically committed to it.
I disagree incredibly strongly on this take as well. I actually think this is a really great fit for legal enforcement. Any attempt to legislate behavior like this runs into edge cases. So you either have legislation which is incredibly heavy handed which bans lots of good behavior, or thousands of arcane rules and large incumbents can pay thousands of lawyers to figure out exactly what is allowed and thwart the rules.
Instead of you have a law that says "don't be evil", the companies which act the most evil get punished.
Personally, I’d rather lawyers and economist spend the next century trying to quantify the negative externalities of various segments of the digital economy than impose a vice tax on the entire internet.
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.
It seems to me like the right thing to do here is higher marginal taxation on ads served to each user. A social media company making decreasing profits for each ad served to a given person meaningfully changes their incentives.
In a world where ads slowly decrease in value (and after a certain point, provide none), means you optimize for providing a high entertainment value early but not hooking users. It likely would come with a substantial total revenue reduction for these companies (implementation details matter for this ofc), but it could align them with delivering the kind of product people want
I'm willing to be the only person here who apparently agrees with Matt.
While there are certainly good ways to use a lot of data and bad ways to use very little, I suspect there is a correlation between amount of data used and "goodness" of internet usage: the median internet user would probably benefit from shifting some of their internet use from video to text. The median internet user would probably also benefit from just using the internet less overall.
(I think what Matt means is a data tax, not a bandwidth tax. Bandwidth is the rate of information transfer, data is the amount of data transferred.)
I took this idea probably a little too far, grading various internet activities on a social desirability score 1-10, plotting that against typical data usage, and calculating an r-squared. *If* you ignore video calling and educational/instructional video, there's some decent support for your idea. That "if" seems like a middle finger to introverted hobbyists, those underserved by local education systems, and anyone with loved ones living far away, though.
This seems very dependent on your own perceptions of social desirability and however you estimated tradeoffs.
Yes, that was the whole point of the exercise: to actually explore what those tradeoffs are and spell them out, instead of assuming they aren't important.
At least it should be directed at ad-financed content. [We Substackers are home and dry. :)]
Not to mention, supporting such a tax seems like a pretty good way to not get elected.
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.
It's like pretending scratching an itch on your partner's back is the same as stabbing them repeatedly.
Kennedy did not overturn the 1960 election!
You are correct. He stole it fair-and-square.
He neither stole nor overturned the election. He won a very close, bitterly contested campaign.
The whole Daley-finding-votes-in-cemeteries story is fun, but has been convincingly debunked. For one thing, votes in Southern Illinois (reliably Republican) came in after Chicago, meaning he could not have held Cook County's results until he knew how many votes he needed (which is central to the myth).
More basically, Kennedy still wins the Electoral College even if he loses Illinois!
In 2000 there was a legitimate difference about who won depending on what vote-counting procedure was followed, etc. It’s like saying there’s no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit because lots of people file lawsuits.
Wtf did I just read? Yes, Jan 6 and hanging chads are different degrees of election interference. But political violence is a wildly different "kind" than procedural chicanery. One can be fought with words, the other demands blood and destroys a fundamental pillar of the state (monopoly on violence leading to peaceful transfer of power).
You really can't ignore the terroristic vandalism of the preceding few years, and act as if January 6th was some completely unprecedented action. Maybe once Monument Avenue is fully restored, we can agree that politically motivated vandalism is a bad thing. But at least for me not until then.
What violence are you referring to? (I don’t know where Monument Avenue is.) Was it undertaken in an attempt to reverse an election result? Was it the culmination of a long series of attempts, legal and illegal, to reverse an election result? Because if January 6 wasn’t unprecedented in the US I would definitely like to know about the precedents!
I always feel like I'm taking crazy pills when this comes up because I remember a big, big effort on the left to convince electoral college voters that they didn't have to vote for Donald Trump, actually, because something something content of character something something misinformation something something popular vote. How different is that than telling your party in the Senate that they shouldn't affirm the voting results?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election
Because what the Democrats asked for is legal, and within the original concept of the electoral college. There's actually an interstate compact that's trying to get every state to direct their electoral votes to the popular vote winner!
You can disagree with what the position taken, and that's fine, but it is in no way the same as January 6.
Did anyone *in the government* put pressure on the electors? For instance, did the president do this? Did Obama call up electors like Trump called senators and the Vice President?
Also, do you think that telling senators not to certify the EVs was the extent of Trump’s attempt to hold power? Trump *set up an alternate slate of electors*!
I mean, differences in degree matter. When committing the crime of assault, the sentencing judge is going to look at whether you merely pushed someone hard or beat the living crap out of them.
Not sure if I fully agree with you, but I encountered something relevant while listening to an audiobook on Martin Van Buren. Apparently his reaction to losing in 1840 was a lot closer to 2020 Donald Trump than you'd expect, at least in terms of rhetoric. Summarized by Claude:
Van Buren's own pre-election suspicions: Van Buren believed Whig rhetoric was the precursor of a massive conspiracy to steal the election. He wrote to Jackson of the potential vote fraud, warning "the mischief will be done before you are apprised of the danger," and initiated an election-eve investigation of previous state contests, trying to document Whig chicanery. Presidentprofiles
His reaction after losing: He called the election a "catastrophe," resulting from Whig fraud rather than Democratic collapse, writing to Andrew Jackson: "Time will unravel the means by which these results have been produced, and then the people will do justice to all." Encyclopedia.com
Contemporary newspaper allegations: A Democratic newspaper from October 1840 ran a front-page story headlined "INFAMOUS FRAUD EXPOSED," alleging that Whigs in New York were paying $30 per person to come to New York to vote in as many as five different districts. RareNewspapers.com
There are many, many parallels between Andrew Jackson and Trump - the populism, insecurity, creation of a new coalition, disfunctional cabinet, general air of conspiracy... I always read van Buren as more of a Rubio/Vance figure, the skilled politician that got swept up in populism.
Bush v. Gore was hardly election overturning. Nor was Kennedy in 1960, though at least that was shady. It just wasn't election overturning.
Didn't kennedy actually steal an election?
I believe it's pretty well established by now that there was actual voter fraud i believe in texas.
Texas voter fraud, yeah Johnson totally did that in his 1948 Senate race: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal. Robert Caro notes that there was always plenty of vote-buying and ballot-stuffing in South Texas in that period, but LBJ took it to an unprecedented level.
Usually, when people talk about John F. Kennedy stealing an election, they're talking about Illinois in the 1960 presidential race.
Also, America by the 2010's/2020's was no longer the America of the 1960's. My parents were infants in 1960. Catholics were still often seen as weird. The mafia controlled Las Vegas and major parts of New York's economy. The Asian-American population was miniscule.
Sure. And I agree that Trump's lies and attempts to steal an election are bad, and IMHO make him unfit to be president and he should have been successfully impeached.
Just it's funny how much hate people have for Trump "trying" to steal an election, but JFK actually stealing one is fine for most people.
If we're having to reach back all the way before most adults were alive and before the post-Civil Rights Act realignment happened for an example, we're really stretching. America back then was much closer to being a developing country than America today. We were a poorer and less educated country. It doesn't excuse Kennedy's many crimes, but we were also a country that was still getting its shit together. Standards are higher now than for then.
Kennedy won Texas by about 45k votes in 1960 so the case that any fraud was determinative is less clear but George Parr was still around then and surely could've delivered whatever votes were needed lol.
Sorry thanks for the correction.
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?
Stacey Abrams.
Abram’s didn’t deny that Kemp won the election; she claimed he had won it unfairly. She was just being a sore loser.
I don’t think drsophilist was referring to the phone call, but to taking legal and illegal actions to overturn the result, culminating in mob violence.
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.
A lot of these lies probably filter up from the populace lying to itself up to those we elect as much as they come down from politicians at the top lying.
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.
Most democracies have politicians who lie. We live in an imperfect world. That doesn't mean that established democracies all inevitably result in someone like Trump.
I think the longer a system runs the more likely something like Trump festers up
A tax on net emissions (excise on the C content of fuels) would not impact any jobs in the oil and gas business for decades as development of nuclear and other technologies gradually make burning hydrocarbons relatively exensive way of doing things.
A tax would lower utilization of these fuels. You would see lower demand for petroleum products as the vehicle fleet turns over if you priced in the carbon externalities. Yes that would affect employment and investment in related industries.
The only way this doesn’t happen is if you have such a modest carbon tax that it doesn’t materially after consumers’ behaviors.
No, it influences the behavior, but over time. ICE, houses with furnaces phase out. Dometic use of coal goes away first, gas last. Excuse me if I implied zero effect.
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 even pretending your beliefs are more similar to the person you’re talking to than they might actually be is just normal social skills and trying to find common ground. Everyone does it in daily life and you’d have to be kind of autistic not to. It’s very different from lying about material facts.
Sure, but most of the time, politicians are not saying things that are literally true.
If you like your healthcare, you won't be able to keep it
No the tax cuts won't pay for themselves
No those executive orders aren't constitutional
No, it's not waste and fraud that is creating so much debt it's entitlement spending
I think "if you like your health care you can keep it" is a good example. It was a specific claim about the policies in the ACA, it was true, but it was interpreted more broadly in a way that couldn't possibly be true and then people were mad. That's really different from eg Elon saying that they had identified millions of dead people getting social security, which was not true _in the sense that Elon meant_.
Plus, something like 90% of people kept their healthcare after the ACA. Very few businesses were willing to drop benefits and shift employees to the exchanges to save money.
That’s not the complaint though. The complaint is that basically all of the insurance companies dropped the specific plans people were on and forced them in plans that either had much, much higher premiums or had astronomically higher deductibles and OOP maximums. The latter is what happened to me personally, such that the deductibles were so high that I functionally have only had insurance actually pay for something twice in the 15 years since the ACA passed.
Did that actually show up in the data though? As opposed to just being anecdotes?
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.
This isn’t true at all, I’m afraid. Didn’t he promise no more unwise Middle East entanglements, to take just the most recent example?
Trump believed it at the time. Although malignant narcissism combined with a pathological indifference to truth makes it possible to say and believe anything in the moment.
I guess, but maybe those Dems believed what they said at the time too! It seems like a distinction without a difference.
Yes, and public opinion seems to be thoroughly trashing him for it as it should
Trump doesn’t just lie though. His actions are what make him materially different from other politicians.
Not too many politicians deliberately use the F word and take the lord’s name in vain while threatening genocide.
When did Trump start dropping the F-bomb? I feel like it wasn’t a thing during his first term. There was an incredibly minor scandal when Kamala said Fuck during an interview sometime in the 2010s (can’t find it because she said it during the 2024 campaign at a rally apparently). I imagine there would have been some coverage if he’d said it during that time
I would have expected you understood the difference between puffery vs fraud.
I think most politicians know the truth and say otherwise. To Donald Trump the truth is immaterial. "My net worth depends on how I feel that day."
Yeah, turned up to 11 and with utter shamelessness that most of humanity is not quite capable of.
But the _content_ of Trumps lies are different, farther from relity than most other politicians.
And often the statement are not even lies. Biden probably really thought that ARA would "stiulate the economy." Trump may really think that allowing people who entered the US ilegally to stay is harmful in some way to non-"elite" people.
The ARA did stimulate the economy. The problem was the economy in no way needed stimulus at the time.
Was being adequately stimulated by the Fed. Fiscal policy added nothing and subtrated nothing.
I think the fact that Trump doubles down when confronted with contradictory information and forces his subordinates to do the same is pretty unique.
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.
A lot of republicans want to help their constituents. Trump doesn’t care about his constituents, just about whether there are cameras watching him (and secondarily if anyone can lend him a few billion).
I'm referring to a democracy, not Democrat vs. Republican. Non-democratic politicians are dictators and want power for themselves.
I look at Congress and I have strong doubts that most are there primarily for their constituents.
Whatever else one thinks of Nixon - and he was a paranoid criminal - he also had a strong and real desire to be seen by history as a statesman in the conventional Great Man mode, and he possessed a superior and cultivated, if flawed, intelligence, which he applied, particularly in his wilderness years in New York, but also in the first term, to figuring out how to do that. It is impossible to imagine, say, Trump getting through the first Viking Press translation of DeGaulle's multi-volume memoirs, interlining and jotting down marginal comments and questions as prompts for when he would next get to see the Great Man, as Nixon did. Nixon did damage, but we will be many many years rebuilding the wreckage after Trump, if our poor old republic is lucky enough even to survive in a reasonably evolved, democratic form.
Yeah, most Trump voters would say all politicians are corrupt liars.
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.
To fix the deficit we have to cut entitlements, raise taxes, or both. We've known that approximately forever.
We used to have one party that wanted to cut entitlements and one that wanted to raise taxes. Now we have two parties that promise not to do either of those things - or only to do them to someone else. One party wants to expand entitlements further and the other wants to cut taxes further. The voters like these plans much more than the old plans.
We are not a serious people anymore.
I honestly think Republicans have lost the capacity to write laws beyond tax cuts and military spending. What’s the last major non-tax bill they passed, No Child Left Behind?
Depends on what you define as "major"?
Laken Riley Act, Genius Act?
More broadly, this has become harder to identify because Congress now rolls so much stuff into incredibly large bills instead of passing separate acts.
The Genius act is a good counter-example, I had forgotten about that one.
Would you argue that the Laken Riley Act is major legislation? Make the case!
I'm not that invested!
But its also very much in the eye of the beholder. I know some people who are convinced that bill will have a big impact, while others think it won't do almost anything.
If I was going to argue something, its the second point. OBBA was mostly a tax cut+ bill, but it had some other stuff in there that could be considered big - e.g. Trump accounts* for kids. But because it was all consolidated, most people don't know much about the details.
*How quick are those going to get renamed!
It is not entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Not entirely, but as the discussion about whether Biden advanced Progressive goals reviewed, there are very different opinion on these things! Matt and Brian have a view that I think many others would dispute!
Great question. Oh, wait, didn’t the pass the Obamacare replacement? I think Trumps said two weeks.
Didn’t Hochul and Newsom just unwind some environmental regulations in their respective states? They didn’t get thrown out of the party and in fact Newsom is the 2028 front runner. I’m not saying you’re not identifying a real problem, but maybe it’s less severe than you think.
They nibbled around the edges
The claim was, “A Democrat who suggested that we need to reform NEPA would probably become a heretic and be tossed from the Party.” Newsom and Hochul reformed environmental legislation in their respective states but are the opposite of tossed-from-the-party heretics.
yeah, and my point is that we are talking about REAL reform, not just nibbling around the edges.
Yeah, no true Scotsman could survive in the Democratic Party.
"There is still no nationwide discussion of the looming insolvency of SS and Medicare and what to do about it."
Amusingly, the only time I've seen references to this from politicians was in *pro-Trump* mailers I got during 2024 that said that SS would cut benefits under Harris... 🤯
“Out of the half a million charging stations created by the IRA, I think 19 were actually built.”
This is just stupid. A quick Google search will tell you that 120 to 150 operational charging stations were built, and many more were going to be built (by the states, which is why the program moved slowly), before the program was halted by Trump. He illegally froze NEVI funding in January 2025 (much remains selectively blocked for blue states only) although some was unblocked by the courts. When illegally freezing funds stopped working, the administration then created a new set of 100% “buy American” rules (up from 55%) which makes it impossible to build any of the additional planned charging stations, since there are no 100% US-made chargers.
I don’t understand why anyone would think an effective sales pitch for their worldview would contain facts that are so verifiably at odds with reality.
Your alternate facts are contested.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/05/michael-rulli/biden-law-gave-states-75-billion-for-ev-charging-3/
You posted an article from back in 2024 that doesn’t contest anything I said.
you said 120 to 150, the article says about 60. When I had originally looked up how many had been built it was 19. I picked the article because it was in 2024, the time of the election. My point was that we still cannot build anything.
You may think 60 or even 150 is a great job. You would have a different opinion of what success is.
The number I gave you is current as of today. The money wasn’t lost or wasted, as you apparently believe. It was delivered as a reimbursement plan through the states, which meant that states first needed to plan the deployments and only afterwards would a single dollar of Federal money flow to them. Because of this structure and the need for a nationwide standard, it took much longer for builds to happen than it should have. And of course once the buildouts started to happen at a more rapid clip in late 2024, Trump illegally withheld the money (until he lost in court) and now he’s trying other tactics to make building with that money impossible. That money will probably end up getting stolen for direct payments to the Trump organization and other cronies, while idiots complain about Biden wasting it or some other misinformed ignorant nonsense.
You can criticize the Biden administration for going through the states, and the delays that produced (I’m with you, that was a real opportunity cost, but also give your alternative plan!) But if your pitch is “here is my world view, I will try to convince you along the way that this NEVI money was wasted or stolen by Biden, when it wasn’t” then people are going to fact check you. The chargers didn’t cost unreasonable amounts of money; payments were only allocated when chargers were built; that money wasn’t wasted. The goal was to build out a US capability to manufacture half a million highly-specialized pieces of tech, which takes time and required a guaranteed multi-year source of funding. NEVI was a pretty good way to do that, and was basically murdered before it could produce that capability. But by all means let’s moan about how we can’t build things, while dancing on the grave of attempts to actually build that capability.
I don’t I said anything about waste. It is the incompetence of our government and our system of NIMBY and lawsuit that stop us from building anything in a timely fashion. You want to know another problem? All the DEI contraction policy BS it screwed up everything in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. I said at the time that NIMBY lawsuits Indian burial grounds whatever would be impossible to build 500,000 charging stations. Impossible. I am proven correct in that.
I met Sir John Major in the early 2000s, shortly after he'd lost the 1997 UK General Election in a landslide and was regarded as a stiff, robotic, grey politician with no charisma.
He was the most charismatic and persuasive person in the room and positively lit up the room with his personality.
There are very few politicians for whom that is not true.
The only senior politician I've ever met that I'd say that about is Liz Truss, who really is as stiff and artificial in person as she seems in public.
I'd take an out-and-out decent, diligent public servant like John Major over a dozen Boris Johnsons.
Oh, absolutely!
Yes, and performers are on another level. Ricky Gervais has built a whole career on supposedly being ugly. I saw him once on the street and he was quite good-looking. I remember Tony Kornheiser saying how awful it was to be on television next to Jimmy Smits. Supposedly even movie stars didn't want to be photographed beside Keanu Reaves when he was young.
Theresa May?
Haven’t met her.
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.
The good ol' "answer the question you wished was asked" approach.
“They are going to understand that Democrats don’t like to be mean to sympathetic people, but that realistically the only way to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control is — yes — to frankly and unapologetically turn away people who are in fact not rapists or murderers or terrorists but just basically normal people who simply don’t have permission to move to the United States.”
It is not mean to turn someone away when they get here, or even shortly after, if they don’t have a credible asylum claim or lawful grounds to be in the United States. It may be disappointing for those people, but it is not cruelty to turn them away.
It is mean to tacitly accept them coming here, working, building a life and a family, and then telling them to leave.
For example, our asylum system must be faster to avoid this outcome. Claims should be processed in a matter of a few months, not 5 years.
Yes, and they never should be released into the country to start building that life.
That would require spending much more money on legal personnel and facilities. The recent bipartisan bill that Trump shit canned would have done that.
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.
Is that true? Basically all of the semiconductor money is allocated to specific projects now, it only hasn't paid out because it pays out in stages.
TSMC's first Arizona fab is open, two more are going to open. Micron's massive expansions are almost done. The big Samsung fab in Texas is going to be done this year.
It kind of just sounds like you're blaming the government for the fact that Intel is a disaster company that is structurally incapable of making good choices.
Agreed. I think this is a huge problem on the left. Focusing on money spent (or at least budgeted) and not on outcomes.
The main problem with the semiconductor money is Intel just sucks at manufacturing semiconductors compared to Samsung and TSMC.
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.
>It may have been meaningfully worse politically to have done less,
Exactly. No one ever thinks about the counterfacfactual. Less growth and higher unemployment also harms an incumbent party. Not just inflation!
“the ARP was not an effort to “avoid depression”, but rather an effort to catalyze recovery“
This is a great and correct
distinction. Much appreciated.
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 was there in 2003 for much of the summer in a scouting exchange and the Midlands felt comparable to SE PA, albeit with smaller housing. My middle class host family, with a single earner in a job comparable to my dad’s, owned many of the same things and enjoyed most of the same leisure. The fact that my host friend and I were able to hop on buses to get around Darby alone at 12 was awesome.
Every time I’ve been back since the gap in material standards of living seems to yawn wider, and when I hear professional class British coworkers discuss the challenges they face it just seems depressing.
UK is stagnate even relative to Europe. Last year, Italy surpassed the UK in GDP per capita. Italy!
Wow, crazy!
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.
>In the states between SSA/Medicare/Medicaid and private health insurance we end up paying a similar amount for better care<
"We end up paying a similar amount" is a stretch. While the *percentage* is about the same, far higher unit prices mean total out of pocket costs average 3x-5x higher in the US. However, those higher costs probably do buy some advantages (shorter waits, private rooms, more diagnostic screening options) and Americans are more affluent. But for low income people not covered by reasonably robust public programs, healthcare in the US is inaccessible in a way that isn't the case in Britain.
Basically, the US screws itself in terms of how much it spends on healthcare, but all that extra spending does buys some advantages (just not enough to justify the six point of GDP premium), while access remains terribly uneven.
Yes the % is what I mean. We pay more with the same % because we earn more, costs are not decoupled from wages, precisely the opposite due to baumol effects of wages and glut in amount of people working in the space v. other industries.
Low income people are absolutely covered by a variety of overlapping public programs. The completely uninsured are the ones left out, but medicaid is extraordinarily generous. Medicare Advantage was so generous that it led to insurers backing out because they couldnt make the math work. SNAP and EITC have grown considerably. The only catch to all of this is essentially work requirements. You have to have a job of some kind, or be seeking one actively, to qualify for a lot of the generous benefits. Good stuff here to read through it all - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/changes-in-the-safety-net-over-recent-decades-and-their-impact/
Yeah, but work requirements are shit. The Medicaid population just isn’t gonna do that. If you work the amount of hours they require at an actual job, you no longer qualify for Medicaid. And volunteering? Give me a break. Are they setting people up with volunteer hours? They want people to do *that* 20 hours a week?!? People who are outside the economy? And don’t get me started on the “must apply for 3 jobs a week” rule that folks game by applying for nuclear engineer and CxO jobs while living in their grandma’s basement. Those rules are part of what’s ruining capitalism by forcing the AI screening of bullshit online job applications because I have to imagine there are a whole lot of swine you gotta dig through to find a pearl.
Luckily this seems to be another thing handled by the states. I reckon
I agree work requirements can be onerous. But the opposite is also bad. There doesnt seem to be a great option here without a boilerplate "must be seeking work if able" where "if able" does an extremely large amount of subjective heavy lifting. Too lax and state coffers are destroyed and you end up (like NYC) spending more per homeless person than the average wage earner takes in annually. Too stringent (like Arkansas) and you get too many people kicked off coverage, leading to higher rates of delayed care and rationing of medications for chronic conditions, so the costs end up getting eaten by emergency room visits that end up being more expensive overall. It's a fine line to thread.
I think it would just be best to require token copays for Medicaid services. Doesn’t have to be a lot and obviously you wouldn’t do that for patients in institutions, which we should have a lot more of, but just charging folks a buck or two for things would reduce a fair amount of spend bc people waste that which is free
The transit issue isn’t one about personal spending. It’s just a kind of option that no amount of money can buy in the United States. There just isn’t a way for me to get into Los Angeles or San Diego without being stuck in traffic, or spending half an hour getting to the nearest train station.
And that train only runs once every hour or two.
I reckon you could go by helicopter, Sao Paolo style, if money were really no object, but where would you park it?
Actually, in Los Angeles, for several decades there were fire codes that required every tall building to have a helipad on top. (There was a fire at the Aon building in dtla in the 80s where some people evacuated by helicopter because the stairs were obstructed.) As a result, the skyline has lots of flat tops, and you probably could get between century city and dtla by helicopter. But there’s no good landing sites in Orange County as far as I know.
As a resident Europoor here, one of the many reasons I'd never consider emigrating to the US (other than the obvious stuff, like family), is how unsafe the US seems. This is not only via reporting, but every time I go on holiday in the US or my friends do we trade stories of witnessing crazy stuff on public transport, seeing people doing drugs in the street, turning around a corner and feeling really unsafe. You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US, and you are more likely to die younger in the US, even if you are rich!
Also your education system is awful.
I think most Brits would prefer Australia as more culturally similar, safer and also with much higher salaries.
Our higher education system is second to none
Over 3x the amount of Europeans die annually from heat than from violent crimes in America
I can control whether or not I get an air conditioner (we have one!), I can't control whether I get run over by a giant SUV, or being a victim of crime.
From here it seems that the best of the US higher education system is only accessible if you pay for private primary and secondary education or have a compelling personal sob story for a good admissions essay. In the UK just have to get good exam results, which as a parent is a much less stressful proposition.
In any case, US life expectancy is much lower than UK life expectancy, wealthy Americans live less long than poor Brits. I am not trading 10 years of life so I can afford a new iPhone every year.
I already can afford a new iPhone tbh - the other factor here is that as a relatively high income Brit (like that police officer!), I have a good quality of life, with savings, property, holidays. Even if I didn't have family tying me here, I'm not sure what the extra money would buy me that I'd actually want. I'm already not spending most of my salary! I'd certainly get less holidays in the US and they'd be more expensive.
I'd probably get a larger, nicer house, although getting the equivalent of what I have in London on a comparable US city wouldn't be possible IMO.
Also, I hate driving. Public transport is better!
The US has far hotter weather in many places during the summer. The rampant deaths are just as much of a policy choice.
Our flagship state colleges which are extremely affordable for in-state residents are far better than their European counterparts. At the higher end of elite colleges student aid is extremely generous. Life expectancy is lower because of obesity, a problem of abundance and lifestyle not of want and need like heat death.
Life expectancy in the US lower due to drug deaths, obesity and car deaths. You can opt out of that culture only so much, and I don't want those risks for my children. You can't fully opt out of car crashes/pedestrian deaths. You can't fully opt out of a medical culture that over prescribes pain killers.
Yes, deaths to heat are a policy choice. But a policy choice I can personally avoid, whereas I can't really influence whether or not a giant American HGV is going to kill me while I drive (even by the very best defensive driving!).
The US has a fantastic economy and entrepreneurs and amazing scientific research, but that wasn't my point at all - my point was that US college admissions is not based on how good you are, it's based on how compelling you can be in a personal essay. Stressful stuff - much easier to have a clear system where externally assessed academic performance is the most important metric.
Even getting into those flagships can be difficult - anyway are they that good? Didn't the University of San Diego reveal that a significant proportion of their incoming 1st year class couldn't even do basic maths? A British 11 year old could do better than many new UCSD undergrads.
The crime and disorder are definitely an issue if you want to live in most major cities compared to Europe (though negligible in many suburbs and some states like the northern interior).
What’s your issue with the education system? It varies a lot by state, but US PISA scores aren’t dramatically worse than other OECD countries.
They're worse than the UK where I live, and getting into a good US uni is decoupled from academic performance in a way that makes it very stressful for parents. And my impression is that US has a lot more tech in the classrooms and much lower academic standards, because there are no external examinations to keep schools honest. I prefer the European standard of measuring performance by external assessments.
"getting into a good US uni is decoupled from academic performance"
This isn't true in my experience, at least for a regular person (no legacy admissions or special talents). Getting into UC Davis or University of Texas or Carnegie Mellon is pretty straightforward, although it takes pretty hard work.
Perhaps the difference you're thinking of is that you can do well in the US and then it's a crapshoot which two of the five similarly ranked universities actually accept you, but going to one specific university doesn't matter much anyway.
Aren't many US unis test optional?
>You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US, and you are more likely to die younger in the US<
This is not so. Homicide is obviously a lot more common in the United States than in other rich countries, but even in the US it's still thankfully a very rare occurrence, and rapidly growing ever rarer.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/23/us/us-cities-homicide-rate-report
To put it another way, about one American in 25,000 gets murdered each year. And the odds are (far) lower still for people not personally involved in criminal activity (which presumably includes nearly all tourists).
And yes, "crime" in general—including violent crime—doesn't appear to be higher in the United States than in other rich countries.
>Also your education system is awful.<
Based on what? Our huge share of Nobel prizes? Our ability to be 40% richer than you?
It is so! It's rare in the US and it's much rather than the UK.
Education in primary and secondary schools worse than UK based on Pisa, Timss, PIRLS. Your best universities are only accessible with a compelling sob story or if you are a "legacy", or if you come from a top US private school.
As a parent, the UK system is much less stressful. Just get your kids good examination results. It's all very transparent and clear. US seems to be random and hard to predict.
US is a big rich country with lots of immigrants and you definitely don't need me!
>It is so!<
Your statement above that "You are much more likely to be a victim of crime in the US" is almost certainly false. The gold standard, most comprehensive cross-country comparison of crime victimization shows the US to be middle of the pack among high income countries:
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/175
"The Wire" is a very good TV show, not an academic study!
>Education in primary and secondary schools worse than UK<
That must explain Britain's desultory economic performance compared to America's.
>As a parent, the UK system is much less stressful<
How much time have you spent as a parent in the "US system"?
>US is a big rich country with lots of immigrants and you definitely don't need me!<
True.
I mean you're not really responding to my points here. Yes, Britain is doing badly economically. But it has a better education system, better educated citizens and a much less intensive parenting culture. There are lots of Brits who'd love the US, but for most of us we don't like the culture. Brits prefer to emigrate to Australia. Although having said that of my friends, all the emigrants (all men!) live in the US, all three of them. All Cambridge graduates actually!
Looking at how many Americans die violently, and die at all, America is dead last. You have the worst life expectancy, and personally I like living. And yes, that low life expectancy extends to rich Americans too.
Much rather than in the UK, even
Idk them gypsies in Milan will steal your purse with a quickness
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.
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.
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…
If work in Big Tech, it’s shocking how much less you make if you move to Europe.
Another reason to put up a Great American Firewall, to prevent competition in the labor market
The disparity really is shocking. I worked for a mid sized European tech company for 4 years in a legal role and made more than our general counsel and most of the leadership team. It’s not hard to see why European tech companies are so far behind.
It may not be even, but for those on the lower end of the pay scale, the lack of a safety net in the US is scary. It may be why so many young people say they would rather take the low wages in return for a better safety net as protection. Maybe it is because I spend much of my time with households that make less than $50,000, but I would probably prefer this trade-off. Our rich are much richer in the US, but at some point, that doesn't really matter to those on the low end. It may even make people more resentful than they would be in a society with more compressed incomes.
I feel like this ignores the considerable safety net we *do* have, particularly in blue states and cities. I'm in NYC. Half the city is on Medicaid. That's free health care, completely free. And higher quality than the NHS. A quarter of the city is on SNAP, having their grocery bills significantly defrayed. Between rent stabilization, city-owned housing, and Section 8, about a third of the city is paying well below market rents.
These are just a handful of programs. There is a safety net in this country.
But if you are in the situation where, for instance, you aren't eligible for Medicaid, but your deductible is $10,000, you are in a bad spot in the US. Most medical bankruptcies are people with insurance but high premiums, deductibles, and copays. Medical bankruptcies are practically unheard of elsewhere. People in their 20s talk about health insurance way more than I ever remember doing. It weighs heavily on people. So even if we improve the safety net in other areas, if we do not change our health insurance system, life will feel very financially precarious for many.
I am surprised to hear that about a third of the city is paying below market rents, I just checked the waiting lists, and the average wait is four years and three months for subsidized housing in NYC, which is substantially better than I thought. I am now curious what rent level I would qualify for.
My understanding is that medical bankruptcies are vastly overstated. From what I recall, the numbers are often juiced by counting any bankruptcy for which medical bills were included, even if they weren't the precipitating factor.
Perhaps bankruptcies are rare, but about 1/3 of households have medical debt - medical bills that they can't pay on time or end up putting on a credit card that they can't pay the full balance on. I do not recommend the latter, as I recently learned that any health bills paid by credit card are not eligible for medical debt relief, at least in New York State.
I don't know if this is high or low, or even particularly bad. A quick search suggests this is also an issue in Europe:
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/05-12-2024-up-to-1-in-5-households-in-europe-experience-catastrophic-spending-because-of-health-care-costs--new-who-digital-platform-shows
Yes in blue states the safety net is reasonable. It’s not the only, but a major, consideration for why we live in WA. It is good to know that we will have healthcare if our jobs are lost, and it is good that my husband has a union so the former won’t happen.
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.
Related, seems wild to me that you have to wait a minimum of four years before becoming a sergeant in the DC police. Seems like the police equivalent of occupational licensing. Surely someone will chime in with a “but actually you do need that much time to be worth promoting” to which I say either you clearly have limited experience with how jobs work, your talent pool sucks, or your talent development program sucks. And they’re not mutually exclusive!
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.
This is the lamest shit I've read all week.
In Boston the party used to stop at 12:30 because that's when the T stopped (and who wants to pay for an Uber). Now the T runs until 1:30. It's still dumb because the bars close at 2, but it's progress!
Ugh, yes. I have never been a partyer, and even this nerdy native Bostonian remembers plenty of times running to catch the last train. 12:30 was so early. Glad they have at least changed it to 1:30.
When I was partying in GA and FL (late 90's to early 2000's) We just went to the after party club after the regular clubs shut down at 2:00 AM
In particular I can remember leaving an after party in Atlanta at 1 PM or so the next day. More common was going home between 6 AM and 8 AM. The good thing about that was all the cops had gone home and were no longer looking for you.
In my college the party started as soon as Friday classes ended at 4pm which meant that most people were asleep or passed out by 11pm which was amazing.
Oooh, Maine content. What I live for. As a Mainer who is left enough to have gone to see David Sedaris at Merril earlier this week, but also right wing enough to be mad at Sedaris for saying Eventide is the best restaurant in the world (not even the best oysters on that side of Portland; fight me tourists), my take is that Platner brings a few things.
1) The whole political outsider persona is quite appealing. We're in a place where insider v. outsider is a much bigger deal than left v. right, and Platner plays that hard in a ways Mills (and hopefully, Collins) have no real defense against. Mills' most effective attack ad was completely undermined when it came out the women in it were all Democratic party operatives. Bad look.
2) Maine Dems are tired of getting kicked around by Collins, and have made the sensible choice too many times. A high variance option seems more plausible then running the obvious choice. Collins has been out-performing Republicans in the state so long, by so much, that it feels like there's nothing left to do but gamble.
3) big strong arms that i want to hold me
4) Matt's right about the more liberal shift Maine has taken, but that shift is almost entirely driven by the the much more urban southern part of the state. Platner reads as both an authentic Mainer to them, and clearly not a member of the southern Maine bourgeoise that have run the Democratic party for ... Ever? So I think this hope is that Platner reads to lower information voters are being authentically Maine, despite being the representative of those southern Mainers (and people from away we have somehow allowed to move in).
I'm also a Mainer, and generally pretty skeptical about progressives, but I'll vote for Platner in the primaries. Mills can absolutely not beat Collins. It's too easy for voters to blame her for everything they don't like about the state. The big question is whether Platner does read as authentic to the voters in the north and west who are not strongly affiliated. Collins has some rock-solid support there. Nevertheless, I absolutely agree that Platner can capitalize on his outsider status with some of these voters and that may succeed. In that respect, the tattoo and Reddit post stuff kind of works for him. He's not a Nazi, obviously, but he has fucked up in various macho ways in the past, which marks him as clearly not a processed, synthetic Democratic establishment product.
It's an easy choice for me, given that Mills can't beat Collins. But there is this other upside, which is that if Platner loses, I can fling that in the face of all my Bernie fanatic friends who insist that if the Dems just ran truly progressive candidates, they would win because there's all this covert support for their policies out there, just waiting to activated. At this point, I can't even be sure they're wrong, given how weird the political landscape has become.
That said, while the guy is a genuinely gifted campaigner, he is also kind of an idiot--the tattoo is an unforced error--and will have no idea what he's doing if he gets to the Senate. Mills without a doubt would be a more effective legislator. Still, she can't win and he might, and getting rid of Collins would be worth it.
Oh, and in my experience, Mainers--maybe not in Portland, but I live in midcoast--absolutely hate domestic migration. People from away buying up houses (especially if they only occupy them seasonally) is the No. 1 thing they blame for the cost of housing. Also, there are relatively few tradesmen, so it's difficult to get any work done and when you do, it's very expensive, and this is also blamed on rich people "from away." People move here to get away from it all, and they bitch incessantly about the traffic during the summer and how much they hate tourists. Maine really needs more jobs, though why the people complaining about this don't become carpenters or electricians when there is such a shortage of those, I don't know. The complaint that younger people can't get a foothold in the housing market is common across the nation, but here it is always blamed on rich seasonal home buyers, retirees, and real estate investors turning homes into AIR B&Bs. IDK now true that is, but you can't blame people for getting mad when they live in towns where they can't afford a house yet there are houses sitting empty everywhere 9 months of the year.
Where do you go for the best oysters in the Old Port area?
If you insist on staying in the Old Port? Honestly, I like Hunt and Alpine but the rest of the menu there has a tendency to soften my opinions. Scales feels trite to say, but they’re fantastic, obviously. The real place, in the Old Port, would be Bread and Friends. But travel down to Washington and visit The Shop, or Wayside Tavern up in the Arts District. Or, even better, Lady Shuckers if you can stand the indignity of setting foot in (shudder) South Portland.
I don’t generally don’t stay in Portland at all anymore, except maybe at the Hilton Garden Inn at PWM to catch an early morning flight out. (Last time I was at Eventide was late January last year - a couple days after the airplane-helicopter crash at DCA. Dropped my rental, and then found my flight—all flights—to DCA were cancelled. Turns out it’s dirt cheap to stay in the Old Port on a Friday night in January. Fore Street wasn’t busy at all: no wait for a table, but my wife didn’t like what they were serving. So Eventide.)
I agree, BTW, with your terse analysis of the north-south divide. I grew up in Maine. I go back a lot, and have spent a lot of time over the years in places like Portland and Ogunquit, and also in places like Skowhegan. The divergence of wealth and politics is right out in the open for all to see, if they look. Not a lot of doublewides on Munjoy Hill and not a lot of pride flags flying in Somerset County.
If you had gone to Fore Street that night we could have had dinner together (:.
My mother was from Maine, and that side of my family is still mostly there. Almost the only time we stay in Portland is winter, specifically the end of January for my birthday. Restaurants are all available.
Funny what you say about Munjoy Hill. That's where my mother grew up, and even into my early adulthood it was mostly blue collar. During one trip to see my grandmother late in her life, my BIL and I seriously considered buying one of the big multifamily homes right on the Promenade. Neither of us had the appetite for risk that would have taken, but man I look back today and think I could cut a couple years off my work life if we had done it.
>If you had gone to Fore Street that night we could have had dinner together (:
Could have called me and I would have come down too!
I'm perplexed by what you mean about the Polish regime not being strong enough to crack down on Solidarity without Warsaw Pact assistance in 1981. The whole point of martial law (according to its authors) was to avoid foreign intervention, and as a matter of historical fact it was imposed entirely by the Polish military. I think you may have your facts backwards on this one.
Yes, I was perplexed by that too. AFAIK Jaruzelski’s message was “if I hadn’t imposed martial law, the Soviets would have rolled in and everything would have gone to hell.”
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.
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.
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.
I mean. There is an amount of money I bet, it probably just needs an awful lot of digits to the left of the decimal.
A friend of mine forwarded an announcement that the US Park Police were offering a hiring bonus of $70,000. My response was "Yeah, but then I'd have to move to DC."
It's also a bit misleading to talk about salaries without taking into account costs. The disposable income differences, adjusted for cost of living, may not be as large as current salary differences imply.
I dunno. Those UK numbers are pretty significant for the UK. I think it reflects higher standards for policing in the UK than in the US.
Why does anyone think that British cops would be a good fit with American police forces?
> 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.
It is not wise to ask American police to be unarmed, when the citizenry are armed to the teeth.
A bilateral arms control treaty between citizens and the state, perhaps.
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
+1 apparently all the young people from New Zealand move to Australia for work, partly because it’s so easy to due so.
It's interesting watching UK crime shows when the police storm in yelling, "Armed police!" To let folks know these aren't the usual unarmed police.
I think people might be more fond of our police if we called them something cute and anachronistic like Scotland Yard, too, which makes me think of a Scotty dog. Who doesn’t like Scotty dogs?
Nope. Nope, nope, nope, and fuck no.
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.
Except no dem is talking about deficit reduction, I think both parties will wait until the last second to fix any debt issues and we all are going to pay the price for that.
Thank you. The difference between Biden's "overspending" and not overspending was the US having 10% inflation and 7% inflation. Not to mention that our GDP gains and economy were WAY better than other rich countries exiting the COVID crisis. I think people are overstating the harm of Biden's agenda.
That 3% difference is almost certainly the difference between president Trump and president Harris.
Same if Dems hadn't screwed up the border.
Maybe but only because people couldn’t understand anything other than “all this inflation is Biden’s fault.” Companies were absolutely price gouging and consumers just submitted to it while blaming Biden. Also the bird flu causing the deaths of millions of chickens which made egg prices shoot up. Not to mention labor shortages and ye olde supply-chain issue. (Could throw in meat packing monopolies though they weren’t caused by the pandemic).
How to message complexity to the American voter? You can’t (a perennial problem for Democrats), so it had to be Biden and Harris’s fault, end of story. But we who are interested in and can cogitate on complexity ought not be saying that.
I think the bigger problem with both Trump and Biden’s pandemic stimulus spending was the blatant and widespread PPP fraud, not so much the stimmy checks to people. An extra thousand bucks to individuals really just isn’t that much money
It was only going to be inflation generating if the Fed went along with it. If Powell has said "hey this is likely to be inflationary, time to raise rates" a year earlier as many were advocating for then a lot of this pain could have been avoided.
I can only imagine the backlash that the Fed would have gotten had they preemptively raised rates at a time when Congress was passing stimulus spending bills to avoid a recession. Democrats would have been howling for their heads.
And it would have been the right thing to do, it might have even saved Biden/Kamala if inflation never spiraled
The reason that the Fed is independent is so that they're isolated from political concerns
The Fed is independent, but they are not isolated from political concerns as demonstrated very clearly by Trump and Powell.
Around 2010 the Detroit Medical Center (DMC) was sold to Tenet which is a for profit health system. I saw the hospital CEO, Mike Duggan, give two presentations about the sale to two very different groups. He is now the mayor of Detroit and currently running for Governor of Michigan
His presentation to local citizens painted DMC as being in dire financial straights that need to be sold to avoid cutting employees and services. He had to sell them on this being a necessity and scare them with the dire consequences to their lives if the sale was not approved. Part of that was driven around the laws around selling a non-profit to a for-profit entity.
His presentation to a group of health care lawyers painted DMC has rebounding and growing and the sale as a means to accelerate that growth and turn the hospital into a world class hospital. He wanted his peers to see that he was a great CEO who had saved DMC and was prepared to lead it in this new era of growth.
Anyway, it was eye opening to see the same person give the same presentation with the same slides and sell two completely different t stories. Politicians are wild.
Was he lying in either case, or just giving different interpretations and possibilities to the same set of underlying facts?
John from FL argued that all politicians are lying. The thread is too long for me to get involved, but I think this is an illustration of the difference between Trump lying and other politicians persuading different people to the same result but appealing to their own differing underlying motivations. Assuming he wasn't just outright lying.
And then he actually did turn around Detroit. I hope he becomes governor of Michigan. Seems he is actually competent.
Every thing I've heard about Mike Duggan makes him sound like a god among men.
I mean I think it’s hard to take the position that the hospital was in decline and that it was bouncing back without one of them being a lie. That said, my takeaway wasn’t so much that he was lying as it was your point at the end of your post. It’s not as if he used different financial numbers, he just emphasized different points in time to build a narrative that he felt best served his desired outcome given the audience.
I was almost certainly the only person who attended both talks and it has served as a good reminder to me when listening to any advocate. It’s always good to question something when it’s likely exactly what you want to hear or at least what the speaker/writer thinks it’s exactly what you want to hear.
Agreed on Duggan. Hard to argue against the turnaround in Detroit. As long as it’s not the guy bragging about castrating pigs I think Michigan will end up with a pretty solid Governor. Gilchrist seems competent and has been part of a largely competent Whitmer administration.