Luttig’s response to the “removing him from the ballot is undemocratic” mantra is that Trump’s actions on January 6th was undemocratic and makes him ineligible to be elected. There is also an argument that, if he is legally ineligible but removing him would cause a political and perhaps a constitutional crisis, placing expediency above the Constitution is just as dangerous.
Given their ages, is it reasonable to estimate a 15% chance that one of the two, either Biden or Trump, will end up not being a candidate by November 2024?
Re: Long Island. I recently got around to watching Steve Buscemi's directorial debut Trees Lounge set in a WC/middle class Long Island suburb (it was quite good) and in that sense it's not super surprising that these sorts of communities would trend Red after being more Blue due to stuff like legacy Dems dying out or the Democrats becoming a lot more liberal on social issues compared to the Clinton or even Obama years (the movie is set in 1996). Adam's Baldwin's character would probably be a Trump precinct captain and Sam Jackson's character could might be a older black guy who secretly voted for Trump.
Re "American Fiction" - My local movie theater showed a trailer for this a couple of weeks ago. The trailer actually made me want to see it, but now it appears that the theater won't be showing the film. And now you say you liked it. This is annoying. I guess it will eventually be on streaming and I can subscribe to one of the services, but I don't really watch TV and prefer to go to the movies when something good comes out. Which lately has only been a couple of times a year!
That economic map of the EU in GDP per capita is *fascinating*, and not at all what I expected! Matt Y should team up with Noah Smith to write a post going into details of it!
The "blue banana" is interesting, I never knew about it. I get that Switzerland is not in the EU and hence is grayed out on the map, but if it were included, it would also be blue, right?
Random thoughts:
-holy manoly, what happened to Ireland? How is it richer than literally every other part of Europe other than parts of the blue banana and Paris? When I think of Ireland, "massively rich" is not the first thing that comes to mind.
-London, the financial capital of Europe, is poorer than Paris and most of Ireland? What the heck?
-the financial divide between the north and the south of Italy is stark!
-Poland is really doing terribly outside of Warsaw and Silesia. Sigh. I thought Poland was the success story out of the former Warsaw Pact countries! As a Polish-born American, I haz a sad :(
-What can be done to help Eastern Europe develop economically? I'm sure the demographic collapse doesn't help. It's a negative feedback loop: Economic prospects in Romania suck, so young Romanians migrate to Germany, so there are fewer young, dynamic workers to get Romanian economy going, so...
-France is doing much more poorly than I would have expected, outside of Paris.
-Why are Lithuania and Latvia so much worse off than Estonia? Weaker tech sector?
Estonia is an interesting case. Part of it may be due to Estonia having a lot of cultural similarities with the Nordic countries. (During the Viking age, Estonians were raiding the Baltic and fighting with the Vikings.) Once Estonia left the Soviet Union, Nordic companies were pretty enthusiastic about opening offices in Estonia and that probably encouraged clean and competent government and investment.
They were also a democracy between the world wars and that may have meant that they had an easier time reviving institutions.
With regards to SCOTUS staying that Trump is ineligible. How much credibility would a conservative supreme court bank with liberals if it did rule Trump ineligible? Is it a trade off you would make to accept Dobbs or the striking down of Chevron?
edited for clarity: The banana belt countries could get many of the benefits of empire without having the costs to maintain the empire directly. empire building is not the best way to be raise per capita GDP. I argue that being next to the metropoles of the empires helps build wealth.
The wealthiest states are the ones closest to France, Britain and Netherlands. These countries were able to provide banking and luxury services for the neighboring empires and their manufacturing was improved with relatively cheap raw resources. This is similar to the resource curse. The empires could gain tons of value by exploiting the human and natural resources of their lands but grew corrupt and power became centralized. The empires didn't need to invest in their human resources and industries. Nearby countries that weren't colonized like Switzerland could benefit from the cheap resources their neighbors acquired without the corruption that comes with access to natural resources.
You'd have to explain Portugal, which had a world-spanning colonial empire and now is a random small European country. Doesn't seem to have helped them get wealthy! Meanwhile Poland has recently exceeded Portugal's GDP per capita, and Poland never had any colonies at all. More likely the theory is simply bad
I agree Lost future. My comment is about the banana belt countries were ones that had more limited empires. Portugal had an extensive empire so my comment does not apply.
Something to add on the copyright question: copyright governs copies, and copies are created when they are fixed in a tangible medium of expression (like a piece of paper, CD, computer hard drive, etc.) Legally speaking the human brain is not considered a tangible medium, so when you read something and store it in your brain that is not considered a copy for purposes of copyright law. Nor are you creating a copy if you repeat something you read in a book from memory. So copyright law just doesn't apply at all.
In contrast, when you train a large language model you are necessarily making a copy of the training data and storing it on a hard drive somewhere. Because copies are being created, copyright law applies and the person training the model either needs a license or a fair use argument.
"Nor are you creating a copy if you repeat something you read in a book from memory. So copyright law just doesn't apply at all."
Breaking my commenting moratorium to say that, while I'm not a copyright lawyer, I'm skeptical this is accurate. If several people memorized different portions of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," I'm pretty sure they would still owe his estate royalties if they put on a stage performance of the play even if they each recited their characters' lines from memory with no written scripts in front of them.
I'm sorry you are completely right. I was trying to be concise but it's hard because copyright law is complicated.
Copyright law has several different rights, including reproduction, derivative works, and public performance. Reciting a copyrighted work from memory can infringe the public performance right, which doesn't depend on fixing copies in a tangible medium. But I don't think anyone is alleging that training or using an LLM infringes public performance rights, so it's not directly comparable to the NYT lawsuit.
The question on AI is whether it’ll be treated like a ‘material change’ like the Warhol v goldsmith case, or whether it’ll be treated as ‘a broad use tool,which uses very little from any specific publisher’ like oracle v case --
Not only is California doubling-down on HSR from Bakersfield to Merced, it also just mandated that all freight trains and other passenger trains become fully electric by 2035. Fully electric freight trains don't exist even in prototype yet.
The consequences of keeping Trump off the ballot are pretty overstated IMHO. The GOP still needs to have a candidate. They'll probably just stick Don Jr. in as the candidate, and Don will promise to just be the guy who signs important documents, while his dad does all public communications and makes all the decisions.
You said this like 20 other times throughout the article today. That's just not how voters operate or think- it's probably not true that 100% of Trump supporters today will necessarily vote for Don Jr., or whoever else Trump tells them to vote for. They're not automatons man. A significant % will lose steam and interest and drift away, especially as his coalition is made up of a large number of low-information, sporadic voters. The whole history of charismatic leaders trying to pass leadership on to their kids has not really gone over well
Um. Nepotism has an excellent track political record in America. And, to be clear, in my scenario, Don Jr. barely appears in public at all. He's just a name on the ballot and a signature on official documents. Trump Sr. does all the campaigning and does the "acceptance" speech at the convention.
I'm skeptical of anyone's efforts to predict the behavior of Trump's base. But the transgressiveness of Trump bending the rules to get around the Deep State's latest trap for him seems like something they'd *love.* Isn't his consistent defiance of political gravity what makes him so charismatic?
To the extent that you're saying what would happen if Trump passed his support to a different Republican, like DeSantis or something, you're probably right. There are a lot of people that think that Biden is better off running against Trump than Hailey. But I seriously question whether she (or DeSantis or Scott) can hold that coalition together. Doesn't that make it all the more likely that, if we're gaming out the post-disqualification election, that my prediction will come true?
As conservatives are fond of reminding us, we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. IThe rule of law takes precedence over the popular will- so if a presidential candidate wins the electoral college without winning the popular vote, we don't have to like it, but it's not a constitutional crisis either. If a conservative supreme court were to disqualify Trump, it would be the same thing- even if some people wanted to vote for him, if Trump can't run under the constitution, thats just how it is.
Trump is so dangerous because he represent a movement that does not respect the rule of law- he repeatedly broke the law and didn't face consequences because his party wouldn't hold him accountable. If he does actually face a consequence for his actions in the form of being disqualified, that's a good thing.
I think the risk of a constitutional crisis is also mitigated by how conservative this Supreme Court is. If they do choose to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment, it won't be because of partisan liberals doing it.
People are overstating the consequences. The GOP will need to put *someone* on the ballot. Wouldn't that be Don Jr.? He'll just promise to be a rubber stamp on his dad's decisions and he'll let his dad give all the speeches and stuff. MAGAs get to feel like they outsmarted the globalists, and nobody bbs anything.
Also the idea that ‘ we cannot rule on the Constitutional merits because a faction will be angry/violent is truly absurd.
If scotus bows to implicit threats of terrorist violence rather than the Constitution, then we are governed by terrorist threats rather than a Constitution. It is a terrible argument that pre-emptively cedes Constitutional governance because of cowardice
"I also want to endorse the Beutler take in favor of Democrats and independents in open primary states voting for Nikki Haley, despite her various flaws."
I just don't get this. Let's focus on the early primary states where the nomination is actually decided and wave away the peculiarities of New Hampshire's eligibility rules. What would we be seeking to accomplish if Democrats voted for Nikki Haley en masse in that state? Delegates don't matter; the point would be to show that Trump is weak. Would large numbers of Democrats voting for Trump's opponent do that? Or would it show that Democrats are so afraid of Trump that they'll do anything to stop him? (This would be Trump's response to a defeat in NH.)
By the same token, what if Republican voters flooded into the NH primary and made Dean Phillips a winner over Biden. Would that show Biden's "weakness"?
Really, the gravamen of this whole argument is that journalists are really stupid. They can only see a number and big number > small number, any hint of context be damned.
I'd like to think journalists are a bit smarter than that.
The theory is that actual outcomes have their usual effect of momentum that changes later primary outcomes.
You give some reasons why it might not work that way. True, it might not. But mostly I believe we'd see changed primary outcomes, and that most of us would never even know how big of a factor Democratic votes were.
How close do your in-laws live to the LBJ Ranch? Interesting to think of living with the ghosts of that land under a Comanche moon.
Luttig’s response to the “removing him from the ballot is undemocratic” mantra is that Trump’s actions on January 6th was undemocratic and makes him ineligible to be elected. There is also an argument that, if he is legally ineligible but removing him would cause a political and perhaps a constitutional crisis, placing expediency above the Constitution is just as dangerous.
Given their ages, is it reasonable to estimate a 15% chance that one of the two, either Biden or Trump, will end up not being a candidate by November 2024?
Re: Long Island. I recently got around to watching Steve Buscemi's directorial debut Trees Lounge set in a WC/middle class Long Island suburb (it was quite good) and in that sense it's not super surprising that these sorts of communities would trend Red after being more Blue due to stuff like legacy Dems dying out or the Democrats becoming a lot more liberal on social issues compared to the Clinton or even Obama years (the movie is set in 1996). Adam's Baldwin's character would probably be a Trump precinct captain and Sam Jackson's character could might be a older black guy who secretly voted for Trump.
Re "American Fiction" - My local movie theater showed a trailer for this a couple of weeks ago. The trailer actually made me want to see it, but now it appears that the theater won't be showing the film. And now you say you liked it. This is annoying. I guess it will eventually be on streaming and I can subscribe to one of the services, but I don't really watch TV and prefer to go to the movies when something good comes out. Which lately has only been a couple of times a year!
Date of the EU GDP map?
That economic map of the EU in GDP per capita is *fascinating*, and not at all what I expected! Matt Y should team up with Noah Smith to write a post going into details of it!
The "blue banana" is interesting, I never knew about it. I get that Switzerland is not in the EU and hence is grayed out on the map, but if it were included, it would also be blue, right?
Random thoughts:
-holy manoly, what happened to Ireland? How is it richer than literally every other part of Europe other than parts of the blue banana and Paris? When I think of Ireland, "massively rich" is not the first thing that comes to mind.
-London, the financial capital of Europe, is poorer than Paris and most of Ireland? What the heck?
-the financial divide between the north and the south of Italy is stark!
-Poland is really doing terribly outside of Warsaw and Silesia. Sigh. I thought Poland was the success story out of the former Warsaw Pact countries! As a Polish-born American, I haz a sad :(
-What can be done to help Eastern Europe develop economically? I'm sure the demographic collapse doesn't help. It's a negative feedback loop: Economic prospects in Romania suck, so young Romanians migrate to Germany, so there are fewer young, dynamic workers to get Romanian economy going, so...
-France is doing much more poorly than I would have expected, outside of Paris.
-Why are Lithuania and Latvia so much worse off than Estonia? Weaker tech sector?
Estonia is an interesting case. Part of it may be due to Estonia having a lot of cultural similarities with the Nordic countries. (During the Viking age, Estonians were raiding the Baltic and fighting with the Vikings.) Once Estonia left the Soviet Union, Nordic companies were pretty enthusiastic about opening offices in Estonia and that probably encouraged clean and competent government and investment.
They were also a democracy between the world wars and that may have meant that they had an easier time reviving institutions.
With regards to SCOTUS staying that Trump is ineligible. How much credibility would a conservative supreme court bank with liberals if it did rule Trump ineligible? Is it a trade off you would make to accept Dobbs or the striking down of Chevron?
Its a good point about credibility
Also, there seems to be a widespread assumption that from a pragmatic/political perspective, the conservative justices will favor Trump.
I’m not so sure a few of those justices wouldn’t be more motivated to see Nikki Haley take his place.
edited for clarity: The banana belt countries could get many of the benefits of empire without having the costs to maintain the empire directly. empire building is not the best way to be raise per capita GDP. I argue that being next to the metropoles of the empires helps build wealth.
The wealthiest states are the ones closest to France, Britain and Netherlands. These countries were able to provide banking and luxury services for the neighboring empires and their manufacturing was improved with relatively cheap raw resources. This is similar to the resource curse. The empires could gain tons of value by exploiting the human and natural resources of their lands but grew corrupt and power became centralized. The empires didn't need to invest in their human resources and industries. Nearby countries that weren't colonized like Switzerland could benefit from the cheap resources their neighbors acquired without the corruption that comes with access to natural resources.
You'd have to explain Portugal, which had a world-spanning colonial empire and now is a random small European country. Doesn't seem to have helped them get wealthy! Meanwhile Poland has recently exceeded Portugal's GDP per capita, and Poland never had any colonies at all. More likely the theory is simply bad
I agree Lost future. My comment is about the banana belt countries were ones that had more limited empires. Portugal had an extensive empire so my comment does not apply.
I'm putting up $50 for this podcast, man, this had better be worth it!
Something to add on the copyright question: copyright governs copies, and copies are created when they are fixed in a tangible medium of expression (like a piece of paper, CD, computer hard drive, etc.) Legally speaking the human brain is not considered a tangible medium, so when you read something and store it in your brain that is not considered a copy for purposes of copyright law. Nor are you creating a copy if you repeat something you read in a book from memory. So copyright law just doesn't apply at all.
In contrast, when you train a large language model you are necessarily making a copy of the training data and storing it on a hard drive somewhere. Because copies are being created, copyright law applies and the person training the model either needs a license or a fair use argument.
"Nor are you creating a copy if you repeat something you read in a book from memory. So copyright law just doesn't apply at all."
Breaking my commenting moratorium to say that, while I'm not a copyright lawyer, I'm skeptical this is accurate. If several people memorized different portions of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," I'm pretty sure they would still owe his estate royalties if they put on a stage performance of the play even if they each recited their characters' lines from memory with no written scripts in front of them.
I'm sorry you are completely right. I was trying to be concise but it's hard because copyright law is complicated.
Copyright law has several different rights, including reproduction, derivative works, and public performance. Reciting a copyrighted work from memory can infringe the public performance right, which doesn't depend on fixing copies in a tangible medium. But I don't think anyone is alleging that training or using an LLM infringes public performance rights, so it's not directly comparable to the NYT lawsuit.
The question on AI is whether it’ll be treated like a ‘material change’ like the Warhol v goldsmith case, or whether it’ll be treated as ‘a broad use tool,which uses very little from any specific publisher’ like oracle v case --
https://open.substack.com/pub/socialdawn/p/ai-fights-the-law-and-might-win
Not only is California doubling-down on HSR from Bakersfield to Merced, it also just mandated that all freight trains and other passenger trains become fully electric by 2035. Fully electric freight trains don't exist even in prototype yet.
https://cei.org/blog/dear-california-just-let-the-trains-run/
The consequences of keeping Trump off the ballot are pretty overstated IMHO. The GOP still needs to have a candidate. They'll probably just stick Don Jr. in as the candidate, and Don will promise to just be the guy who signs important documents, while his dad does all public communications and makes all the decisions.
You said this like 20 other times throughout the article today. That's just not how voters operate or think- it's probably not true that 100% of Trump supporters today will necessarily vote for Don Jr., or whoever else Trump tells them to vote for. They're not automatons man. A significant % will lose steam and interest and drift away, especially as his coalition is made up of a large number of low-information, sporadic voters. The whole history of charismatic leaders trying to pass leadership on to their kids has not really gone over well
Um. Nepotism has an excellent track political record in America. And, to be clear, in my scenario, Don Jr. barely appears in public at all. He's just a name on the ballot and a signature on official documents. Trump Sr. does all the campaigning and does the "acceptance" speech at the convention.
I'm skeptical of anyone's efforts to predict the behavior of Trump's base. But the transgressiveness of Trump bending the rules to get around the Deep State's latest trap for him seems like something they'd *love.* Isn't his consistent defiance of political gravity what makes him so charismatic?
To the extent that you're saying what would happen if Trump passed his support to a different Republican, like DeSantis or something, you're probably right. There are a lot of people that think that Biden is better off running against Trump than Hailey. But I seriously question whether she (or DeSantis or Scott) can hold that coalition together. Doesn't that make it all the more likely that, if we're gaming out the post-disqualification election, that my prediction will come true?
As conservatives are fond of reminding us, we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. IThe rule of law takes precedence over the popular will- so if a presidential candidate wins the electoral college without winning the popular vote, we don't have to like it, but it's not a constitutional crisis either. If a conservative supreme court were to disqualify Trump, it would be the same thing- even if some people wanted to vote for him, if Trump can't run under the constitution, thats just how it is.
Trump is so dangerous because he represent a movement that does not respect the rule of law- he repeatedly broke the law and didn't face consequences because his party wouldn't hold him accountable. If he does actually face a consequence for his actions in the form of being disqualified, that's a good thing.
I think the risk of a constitutional crisis is also mitigated by how conservative this Supreme Court is. If they do choose to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment, it won't be because of partisan liberals doing it.
People are overstating the consequences. The GOP will need to put *someone* on the ballot. Wouldn't that be Don Jr.? He'll just promise to be a rubber stamp on his dad's decisions and he'll let his dad give all the speeches and stuff. MAGAs get to feel like they outsmarted the globalists, and nobody bbs anything.
Absolutely
Also the idea that ‘ we cannot rule on the Constitutional merits because a faction will be angry/violent is truly absurd.
If scotus bows to implicit threats of terrorist violence rather than the Constitution, then we are governed by terrorist threats rather than a Constitution. It is a terrible argument that pre-emptively cedes Constitutional governance because of cowardice
*bombs*
"I also want to endorse the Beutler take in favor of Democrats and independents in open primary states voting for Nikki Haley, despite her various flaws."
I just don't get this. Let's focus on the early primary states where the nomination is actually decided and wave away the peculiarities of New Hampshire's eligibility rules. What would we be seeking to accomplish if Democrats voted for Nikki Haley en masse in that state? Delegates don't matter; the point would be to show that Trump is weak. Would large numbers of Democrats voting for Trump's opponent do that? Or would it show that Democrats are so afraid of Trump that they'll do anything to stop him? (This would be Trump's response to a defeat in NH.)
By the same token, what if Republican voters flooded into the NH primary and made Dean Phillips a winner over Biden. Would that show Biden's "weakness"?
Really, the gravamen of this whole argument is that journalists are really stupid. They can only see a number and big number > small number, any hint of context be damned.
I'd like to think journalists are a bit smarter than that.
The theory is that actual outcomes have their usual effect of momentum that changes later primary outcomes.
You give some reasons why it might not work that way. True, it might not. But mostly I believe we'd see changed primary outcomes, and that most of us would never even know how big of a factor Democratic votes were.
If we don't know how big of a factor Democratic votes were, then that condemns political journalism right there. That's their job.