I'm not sure whether you're in denial about the insane stuff done in the name of DEI, or are actually in favor of it. What are the three most controversial things done explicitly under a DEI banner that you're willing to defend?

Apparently Donald Trump thinks VATs are tariffs. This is a golden opportunity. Maybe someone can convince him to replace the income tax with a retaliatory VAT. That'll show those Europeans who's boss!

The style of bottle depicted here was supposedly later nicknamed "murder bottle," because they were hard to clean, leading to frequent bacterial infection and death, although Google's Ngrams viewer gives no results for "murder bottle" or "murder bottles."

Even in Mississippi, the median hourly wage was $18 in 2023. Certainly not great, but 2.5 times the minimum wage.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes_ms.htm

Nationally, the 10th percentile weekly earnings for full-time workers is $611, and the BLS considers "full time" to start at 35 hours, not 40. As far as I can tell, essentially nobody works full time for federal minimum wage anymore. Even part-time work rarely pays that little except in tipped jobs.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252911200Q

This is really bad, with some pretty serious misinterpretation of statistics (e. g. assuming that everybody working part time would prefer to work full time but can't find a full-time job). He's also acting like he's exposing some deep secrets, but this is stuff anyone who follows economics stats would already know.

I'm hoping to find some time to write up a full debunking.

So it was in contravention of the law, and also Congress made a mistake passing bills requiring it?

Honestly, I'm surprised that Democrats aren't more on board with normalizing hatred of market-dominant minorities. I guess we really are past peak woke.

The Department of Education itself is not constitutionally authorized, so there's kind of perverse symmetry there.

One hypothesis is that Trump got pantsed.

Another is that he got to put on a show for his base, who aren't going to believe the mainstream media when they say he got pantsed. Placating his base with no real damage done is arguably a pretty good outcome, all things considered.

As a one-off, Occam's razor favors the first, but stuff like this just keeps happening, so...I dunno. Maybe he actually is smarter than he lets on.

I mean, he'd have to be, right? He manages to dress himself.

Yes she obviously wasn’t good enough but it could be that no one was good enough because “throw the bums” out has been a global phenomenon

You say that as if Trump had won in a landslide, but it was actually a reasonably close race. A better candidate who actively distanced herself from Biden's screwups, who hadn't made a total ass of herself in the 2020 primary, and successfully positioned herself as a responsible moderate, could plausibly have gotten the couple extra points needed to beat Trump.

I wish Democrats cared about free trade and economic literacy even when Donald Trump isn't in office.

Do you actually have a problem with the meta-policy here, or just the underlying policy? So, for example, if the executive branch were rife with the kind of racism and pseudoscience that you don't like, would you object to an incoming Democratic President issuing an EO to cut that crap out, and encouraging employees to report any attempts to subvert that EO and continue promoting racism and pseudoscience within the executive branch?

If you would have an objection, how specifically would you recommend dealing with this issue?

Again, in this hypothetical, the EO is an attempt to stop the promotion of the kind of racism and pseudoscience that you don't like.

Let's have some concrete predictions. What are some distinctively N-zi things that these N-zis are going to do?

You have never had an original thought in your life, have you?

Ending Birthright citizenship by EO isn’t unconstitutional if five out of four Supreme Court Justices say it is fine by sophistry.

Worked for FDR, but we have a better class of justice on the Court now. There are legitimate questions about whether Congress can eliminate automatic citizenship for children of illegal immigrants (no, Wong Kim Ark didn't address this), but it definitely can't be done unilaterally by the President.

As should be expected from Blueski, this is disingenuous and/or histrionic. Race and sex discrimination in employment is already illegal for all businesses (excepting those with legitimate requirements for sex-specific hiring), which includes government contractors. He rescinded this EO for the affirmative action provision, not the redundant anti-discrimination provisions.

Are you suggesting that Elon Musk was personally responsible for South African Apartheid, or is that just an ethnic slur?

Is MA still at it? Or Kimmi?

I started a new blog. The first post is about research covered last month in the New York Times claiming that there's an elevated risk of homicide victimization in pregnant and post-partum women. I explain that this finding is an artifact of some errors in quantitative reasoning that somehow got through peer review in four different papers.

If Trump issues an executive order postponing the ban for 90 days, which he only has the authority to do if a sale is already pending, who has standing to challenge that? Just Congress? Would competing social media services also have standing?

I've pretty much just given up on new music. I'm sure some of it is good, but I find searching through new-to-me old music to be much more productive

That doesn't sound right. For one, it only takes me 5-6 minutes. One minute per flight would be extremely slow. 85 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 5m/floor * 16 floors = 62.5 kJ. At 360 seconds, that's about 170 watts.

I've been taking the stairs up to my 17th-floor office for a couple of weeks. It's much tougher than I expected!

I usually run up stairs, which works fine for up to five flights or so, but beyond that I just hit a wall and have to start walking. After about ten flights, even the walking is tough.

I'm not sure I understand the argument for the defense in Dillon v. Gloss. Dillon claimed that the seven-year expiration made the 18th Amendment invalid, but the 18th Amendment was ratified in a bit over a year, so the expiration never came into play.

Hypothetically, if the last required state had not ratified the 21st Amendment until more than seven years after its passage by Congress, and a bootlegger had been arrested after 3/4 of states had ratified it, the bootlegger might plausibly claim in his defense that the 21st Amendment was in force because the deadline for ratification was unconstitutional. That would make more sense.

I guess the argument was that since the Constitution didn't explicitly authorize Congress to set a deadline, the entire bill proposing the 18th Amendment was invalid, and not just the portion setting a deadline?

The bill that passed the ERA in Congress specified a seven-year deadline for ratification. That expired decades ago. Furthermore, five of the states that ratified it before the deadline have since rescinded their ratification.

The theory that it was actually properly ratified depends on two questionable assumptions, both of which must be true:

1. The deadline is invalid, because it was not specified in the actual text of the amendment, but in the text of the bill prefacing the text of the proposed amendment.
2. States cannot rescind ratification of an amendment.

As for what Biden and/or his handlers are thinking, nobody outside the administration really knows.