As you will recall, Citizens United was a case in which the government tried to censor political speech about a candidate for office because the people making the speech were organized as a corporation. So it's funny that people who are outraged that the government wasn't allowed to stop them from engaging in political speech are now outraged that a business is voluntarily deciding not to endorse a political candidate.
It's like the only principles they have are who and whom.
The vast majority of voters are incapable of forming an informed opinion on whether there should be higher taxes on the wealthy, because they have no idea how high taxes on the wealthy are.
If low-rent demagogues like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Reich keep telling them that the wealthy don't pay taxes, or that they pay less in taxes than the middle class, and the media don't call then out on their lies, then of course when you ask them if taxes on the rich should be "higher" without specifying higher than what, they're going to say yes.
But if you instead ask them what effective tax rate (including state taxes) the wealthiest 1% (or whatever) should pay, many, perhaps most, of the people who said that they should be "higher" are going to specify a rate that's lower than what the group in question actually pays.
When it comes to abortion, without the end of the filibuster, there will no codification of Roe and no national abortion ban.
I'm not convinced that either of these would pass judicial review. Yes, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, but they were on very solid Constitutional ground in doing so. Constitutional authorization for Congress to ban abortion nationwide is much more dubious. Some of the current Republican appointees might vote to uphold it in bad faith, but I think at least two are better than that.
"Codifying Roe v Wade" is just a dumb meme to drive low-info voters to the polls, and I can't believe that so many people who ought to know better are taking it seriously. Under any plausible Court composition, such a law would be either superfluous or unenforceable. A Republican-appointed majority would strike it down because a) Congress doesn't have the Constitutional authority, and b) they don't like abortion, so they're not going to ignore that fact and make a bad-faith ruling to uphold it. A Democratic-appointed majority would make a bad-faith ruling upholding it, but they'd also make a bad-faith ruling that there's a constitutional right to abortion, rendering the law superfluous.
It's really (or not really) surprising how many viral political claims can't stand up to three minutes of scrutiny.
I used to think political disagreements were about values. Later I figured that they were mostly about theory, like what the effects of various policies would be. Social media showed me that most people base their opinions on stupid sh!t that can be debunked with the slightest effort.
Just sharing a screenshot is pretty disingenuous. In the video, it's made clear that the "C-word" is communist.
That's over the top---though Harris's Senate record was comparable to that of the notoriously extremist Elizabeth Warren---but as much as lefties throw around terms like fascist and [national socialist], they don't really have much room to object.
Back in 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by steel importers contesting Trump’s earlier tariffs. This allowed a lower court ruling to stand that found Congress had delegated tariff authority to the president. In other words, Trump can impose tariffs on Day One without Congress.
It's clear that Trump can impose some tariffs via executive order. It's less clear that he can impose the kind of blanket tariffs he's saying he's going to impose, as the law in question, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, applies specifically to imports of products which are critical to national defense. It's very plausible that the Supreme Court would rule against Trump if he tried to use a bad-faith national defense rationale to impose blanket tariffs. Contrary to the what less-hinged Democratic partisans claim, there are definitely at least two Republican appointees on the Supreme Court who are more interested in upholding the law than in doing Trump's bidding.
Still, I think the best possible outcome here is the 'nut winning the Presidency while Republicans win enough seats in at least one House of Congress to keep her from implementing the idiotic policies she's running on.
Janet Yellen has been disappointing. As an economist, she definitely knows that some of the things she's said in service of Biden's agenda aren't true. I know he pays her to be an unprincipled hack, but...ugh. I just expected better from her.
"Up to," a phrase typically used to indicate an upper limit, is a perfectly reasonable way to characterize the 80th percentile. This isn't even a "well, technically..." situation like would it would be if they had advertised the 99th percentile earnings.
Here's something interesting: Patrick Soon-Shiong's Chinese name is 黃馨祥. "黃," pronounced "Huang" in Mandarin, is a common Chinese surname cognate with Vietnamese Hoang and Huynh. 馨祥 is pronounced "Xinxiang" in Mandarin; Soon-Shiong is probably how it's pronounced in another Chinese language, perhaps Hakka.
So he seems to have dropped his Chinese surname entirely, and adopted his given name as his English surname. It's very common for Chinese people to replace their given name with an English name in an English-speaking (or even Chinese-speaking) context, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Chinese person adopting his given name as a surname.
So your theory is that a) it's obviously not going to influence the election, and b) Soon-Shiong is blocking the endorsement to influence the election so that he won't have to pay his "fair share" in taxes.
I'm beginning to suspect that you're overestimating the epistemological value of seething resentment of those who are more successful than you are.
Facts revealed downthread aside, I'm not following the logic here. You're saying that the editorial board knows that publishing an endorsement of a candidate who's running on a platform against the owner's interests would kill their subscriber base? Why would subscribers care?
Why aren’t scholarships and institutional support for poor white kids from Eastern Kentucky controversial?
The University of Kentucky, like most four-year universities, does not have competitive admissions. I don't mean that it's less competitive than Harvard---I mean that it has a 95% acceptance rate. Typically an acceptance rate this high means that the university has the capacity to admit all applicants who meet their basic standards of college readiness.
What people find most objectionable about affirmative action at universities with competitive admissions is the rejecting of better qualified applicants from disfavored groups over less qualified---often by as much as a standard deviation---applicants from favored groups. At universities with noncompetitive admissions, this is a non-issue. Admitting a less qualified applicant does not require rejecting a more qualified applicant.
Assuming that Garland is going to make the strongest claims of wrongdoing consistent with the evidence (and reading the first several pages of the complaint to confirm), it's probably relevant that he's not saying that they had actual knowledge of money laundering activities, but only that they didn't invest enough in detecting and preventing it.
As I read it, the government outsourced uncompensated law enforcement to the private sector, and is prosecuting them for not doing a good enough job, while government officials themselves enjoy absolute immunity for failing to do a good enough job at stopping crime. Can you imagine if crime-positive prosecutors got brought up on federal charges for systematically refusing to prosecute certain crimes?
The closest thing poor people have in terms of legal obligations analogous to this are things like replacing burnt-out taillights, and nobody goes to prison for failing to do that, either.
Theft, by contrast, is a deliberate and malicious choice to violate others' rights for your own benefit. It's not something that just happens by default when you're busy working on other things.
Nationally, 18% of black 4th-graders and 15% of black eighth-graders scored at or above proficient in 2019. For math, it was 20% and 14%. Depressingly, these numbers are slightly lower than the percentage of students eligible for free lunch who scored at proficient or above.
It is worth noting that proficient isn't the lowest level of basic competence. That's "basic." Only about 30-40% of students score proficient or better, depending on grade and subject.
Statistically, if you have a hundred nationally representative black students, or students eligible for free lunch, it's very unlikely that zero will be proficient. It's not clear that the problems at these Baltimore schools can be reduced to the characteristics of the students attending.
Conservatism isn't defined by whatever the majority of Republican voters want, even insofar as the masses even have coherent policy preferences. It would be more accurate to say that the US no longer has a conservative party among the top two. For that matter, it doesn't have a liberal party among the top two, either.
Traditionally, Democrats have been the party of greed. Their whole shtick is that they're going to tax the top 2-5% of earners and give freebies to everyone else. It was the heart of Biden's platform, and it's a big part of Harris's. To characterize wanting to keep what you earn as greed, and wanting to take what others have earned as generosity is really rather perverse.
Using government to interfere in personal freedom has long been a bipartisan activity, and Democrats have definitely led the charge on expanding government beyond Constitutional limits, starting with the New Deal.
Republicans have been in a really bad place for the past decade or so, but you really have to have had your mind warped by partisanship not to realize that you're describing your own party here.
"Circumstantial" doesn't mean low-quality or unreliable. In any case, I was responding to a positive claim that he was probably innocent, not just a claim that the evidence against him doesn't meet whatever arbitrarily high standard of certainty you would like to require.
Back in August of 2020, PNAS published a paper finding that newborn black babies who were cared for by white doctors after birth were roughly twice as likely to die before leaving the hospital than those cared for by black doctors. Coming hot on the heels of the Passion of the Floyd, a season when systemic racism was in and critical thinking was out, this was quickly picked up by the media and shouted from the rooftops, with, e.g., The Guardian running with it the very day the paper was published. Ketanji Brown Jackson famously blundered in citing the statistic in her SFFA v Harvard dissent, claiming that black doctors doubled the survival of black babies, implying that at least half of black babies treated by white doctors die.
It was pretty obvious from day one that this finding was driven by omitted variable bias, likely relating to white doctors being more likely to treat the highest-risk cases, but questioning claims about racism is a hallmark of white fragility, which was also out that season, so only a bunch of weirdos objected.
Two weeks ago, PNAS published a second paper showing exactly what went wrong, and it's a doozy. The 2020 paper used, as controls, the 65 most common ICD codes found in newborn records. These included codes for birth weight between 1500 and 2500 grams, but, because they're not among the 65 most common ICD codes, excluded all controls for birth weight below 1500 grams, which was found in 81% of cases of neonatal mortality for black babies.
When adding all ICD codes for low birth weight to the controls, the racial concordance effect disappears: Black newborns attended to by white doctors were no more likely to die than those attended to by black doctors. The new model provides much better fit (r^2 = 0.386 vs. 0.144), and the paper finds that the 65 ICD codes used as controls in the original paper added almost no predictive power, which makes sense: Neonatal mortality is rare, so the most common health conditions seen in newborns should not be particularly dangerous. Despite the appearance of having been chosen rigorously, the controls were functionally haphazard and almost worthless.
Now, one might ask whether white white doctors are causing black babies to be born with very low birth weight, but doctors who treat infants with extremely low birthweight are likely to be specialists called in to save a baby after it's born, not whatever random doctor was providing prenatal care to the mother.
So the finding in the original 2020 paper was, as expected, totally spurious: There does not seem to be any effect of doctor race on neonatal mortality. Curiously, there has been no rush by the media to report on this: 12 days after the paper came out, I have not found a single media report on it.
What's unusual here is that not that a paper claiming to find a huge effect from systemic racism and used to score political points turned out to be driven by omitted variable bias. The entire body of systemic racism literature is little more than a bunch of omitted variables in a trenchcoat made of publication bias. What's unusual is that the key omitted variables were precisely measurable enough and documented thoroughly enough to enable someone to write a rebuttal compelling enough to get published.
What's the evidence that he's innocent? Since the DNA on the knife came from the prosecutor handling it after the murder, it's not exonerating. The fact that the witnesses were not particularly credible means that their testimony may not be great evidence of guilt, but also is not exonerating. He was in possession of some of the victim's property, which seems to point pretty strongly to guilt.
It's worth thinking about what it means that it's more expensive to carry out the death penalty than to keep someone in prison for life. Keeping someone in prison for decades is expensive, and execution itself doesn't cost that much, so where does the extra cost come from?
Mostly it's litigation of extra appeals. This should give you pause, because it means one of two things:
1. We're spending too much time and money on frivolous litigation in death penalty cases.
2. We're not litigating other murder cases enough to justify keeping someone in prison for life.
The greater expense of death penalty cases is not an argument against the death penalty, but evidence that either death penalty cases are more expensive than they need to be or that the legal system is cutting corners with other murder cases.
If the second is true, an interesting corollary is that if you're convicted of a murder you really didn't commit, being sentenced to death gives you the best chance of getting out of prison alive.
On “From The Washington Post: On Political Endorsement”
As you will recall, Citizens United was a case in which the government tried to censor political speech about a candidate for office because the people making the speech were organized as a corporation. So it's funny that people who are outraged that the government wasn't allowed to stop them from engaging in political speech are now outraged that a business is voluntarily deciding not to endorse a political candidate.
It's like the only principles they have are who and whom.
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
The vast majority of voters are incapable of forming an informed opinion on whether there should be higher taxes on the wealthy, because they have no idea how high taxes on the wealthy are.
If low-rent demagogues like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Reich keep telling them that the wealthy don't pay taxes, or that they pay less in taxes than the middle class, and the media don't call then out on their lies, then of course when you ask them if taxes on the rich should be "higher" without specifying higher than what, they're going to say yes.
But if you instead ask them what effective tax rate (including state taxes) the wealthiest 1% (or whatever) should pay, many, perhaps most, of the people who said that they should be "higher" are going to specify a rate that's lower than what the group in question actually pays.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
I'm not convinced that either of these would pass judicial review. Yes, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, but they were on very solid Constitutional ground in doing so. Constitutional authorization for Congress to ban abortion nationwide is much more dubious. Some of the current Republican appointees might vote to uphold it in bad faith, but I think at least two are better than that.
"Codifying Roe v Wade" is just a dumb meme to drive low-info voters to the polls, and I can't believe that so many people who ought to know better are taking it seriously. Under any plausible Court composition, such a law would be either superfluous or unenforceable. A Republican-appointed majority would strike it down because a) Congress doesn't have the Constitutional authority, and b) they don't like abortion, so they're not going to ignore that fact and make a bad-faith ruling to uphold it. A Democratic-appointed majority would make a bad-faith ruling upholding it, but they'd also make a bad-faith ruling that there's a constitutional right to abortion, rendering the law superfluous.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/21/2024”
It's really (or not really) surprising how many viral political claims can't stand up to three minutes of scrutiny.
I used to think political disagreements were about values. Later I figured that they were mostly about theory, like what the effects of various policies would be. Social media showed me that most people base their opinions on stupid sh!t that can be debunked with the slightest effort.
"
Just sharing a screenshot is pretty disingenuous. In the video, it's made clear that the "C-word" is communist.
That's over the top---though Harris's Senate record was comparable to that of the notoriously extremist Elizabeth Warren---but as much as lefties throw around terms like fascist and [national socialist], they don't really have much room to object.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Wikipedia says that USA Today has had a longstanding policy of not endorsing candidates, with 2020 being the only recent exception.
Good for them!
On “What If Trump Wins?”
It's clear that Trump can impose some tariffs via executive order. It's less clear that he can impose the kind of blanket tariffs he's saying he's going to impose, as the law in question, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, applies specifically to imports of products which are critical to national defense. It's very plausible that the Supreme Court would rule against Trump if he tried to use a bad-faith national defense rationale to impose blanket tariffs. Contrary to the what less-hinged Democratic partisans claim, there are definitely at least two Republican appointees on the Supreme Court who are more interested in upholding the law than in doing Trump's bidding.
Still, I think the best possible outcome here is the 'nut winning the Presidency while Republicans win enough seats in at least one House of Congress to keep her from implementing the idiotic policies she's running on.
"
Janet Yellen has been disappointing. As an economist, she definitely knows that some of the things she's said in service of Biden's agenda aren't true. I know he pays her to be an unprincipled hack, but...ugh. I just expected better from her.
On “Lina Khan FTC’s Lawsuits Against Tech Feel Like Targeting”
"Up to," a phrase typically used to indicate an upper limit, is a perfectly reasonable way to characterize the 80th percentile. This isn't even a "well, technically..." situation like would it would be if they had advertised the 99th percentile earnings.
"
How would a reasonable person read a claim that they could earn up to a $31/hour?
How would Lina Khan know what a reasonable person would think?
On “From Semafor: Los Angeles Times won’t endorse for president”
Here's something interesting: Patrick Soon-Shiong's Chinese name is 黃馨祥. "黃," pronounced "Huang" in Mandarin, is a common Chinese surname cognate with Vietnamese Hoang and Huynh. 馨祥 is pronounced "Xinxiang" in Mandarin; Soon-Shiong is probably how it's pronounced in another Chinese language, perhaps Hakka.
So he seems to have dropped his Chinese surname entirely, and adopted his given name as his English surname. It's very common for Chinese people to replace their given name with an English name in an English-speaking (or even Chinese-speaking) context, but I don't think I've ever heard of a Chinese person adopting his given name as a surname.
On “From The Washington Post: On Political Endorsement”
I wonder how many of the people raging about this are still raging about Citizens United.
On “From Semafor: Los Angeles Times won’t endorse for president”
So your theory is that a) it's obviously not going to influence the election, and b) Soon-Shiong is blocking the endorsement to influence the election so that he won't have to pay his "fair share" in taxes.
I'm beginning to suspect that you're overestimating the epistemological value of seething resentment of those who are more successful than you are.
On “From The Washington Post: On Political Endorsement”
Facts revealed downthread aside, I'm not following the logic here. You're saying that the editorial board knows that publishing an endorsement of a candidate who's running on a platform against the owner's interests would kill their subscriber base? Why would subscribers care?
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/14/2024”
The University of Kentucky, like most four-year universities, does not have competitive admissions. I don't mean that it's less competitive than Harvard---I mean that it has a 95% acceptance rate. Typically an acceptance rate this high means that the university has the capacity to admit all applicants who meet their basic standards of college readiness.
What people find most objectionable about affirmative action at universities with competitive admissions is the rejecting of better qualified applicants from disfavored groups over less qualified---often by as much as a standard deviation---applicants from favored groups. At universities with noncompetitive admissions, this is a non-issue. Admitting a less qualified applicant does not require rejecting a more qualified applicant.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/21/2024”
Assuming that Garland is going to make the strongest claims of wrongdoing consistent with the evidence (and reading the first several pages of the complaint to confirm), it's probably relevant that he's not saying that they had actual knowledge of money laundering activities, but only that they didn't invest enough in detecting and preventing it.
As I read it, the government outsourced uncompensated law enforcement to the private sector, and is prosecuting them for not doing a good enough job, while government officials themselves enjoy absolute immunity for failing to do a good enough job at stopping crime. Can you imagine if crime-positive prosecutors got brought up on federal charges for systematically refusing to prosecute certain crimes?
The closest thing poor people have in terms of legal obligations analogous to this are things like replacing burnt-out taillights, and nobody goes to prison for failing to do that, either.
Theft, by contrast, is a deliberate and malicious choice to violate others' rights for your own benefit. It's not something that just happens by default when you're busy working on other things.
On “From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform”
Nationally, 18% of black 4th-graders and 15% of black eighth-graders scored at or above proficient in 2019. For math, it was 20% and 14%. Depressingly, these numbers are slightly lower than the percentage of students eligible for free lunch who scored at proficient or above.
It is worth noting that proficient isn't the lowest level of basic competence. That's "basic." Only about 30-40% of students score proficient or better, depending on grade and subject.
Statistically, if you have a hundred nationally representative black students, or students eligible for free lunch, it's very unlikely that zero will be proficient. It's not clear that the problems at these Baltimore schools can be reduced to the characteristics of the students attending.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
Conservatism isn't defined by whatever the majority of Republican voters want, even insofar as the masses even have coherent policy preferences. It would be more accurate to say that the US no longer has a conservative party among the top two. For that matter, it doesn't have a liberal party among the top two, either.
"
Stats and some guesses as to the cause from Guttmacher:
https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/despite-bans-number-abortions-united-states-increased-2023
"
Traditionally, Democrats have been the party of greed. Their whole shtick is that they're going to tax the top 2-5% of earners and give freebies to everyone else. It was the heart of Biden's platform, and it's a big part of Harris's. To characterize wanting to keep what you earn as greed, and wanting to take what others have earned as generosity is really rather perverse.
Using government to interfere in personal freedom has long been a bipartisan activity, and Democrats have definitely led the charge on expanding government beyond Constitutional limits, starting with the New Deal.
Republicans have been in a really bad place for the past decade or so, but you really have to have had your mind warped by partisanship not to realize that you're describing your own party here.
On “Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams”
"Circumstantial" doesn't mean low-quality or unreliable. In any case, I was responding to a positive claim that he was probably innocent, not just a claim that the evidence against him doesn't meet whatever arbitrarily high standard of certainty you would like to require.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
Back in August of 2020, PNAS published a paper finding that newborn black babies who were cared for by white doctors after birth were roughly twice as likely to die before leaving the hospital than those cared for by black doctors. Coming hot on the heels of the Passion of the Floyd, a season when systemic racism was in and critical thinking was out, this was quickly picked up by the media and shouted from the rooftops, with, e.g., The Guardian running with it the very day the paper was published. Ketanji Brown Jackson famously blundered in citing the statistic in her SFFA v Harvard dissent, claiming that black doctors doubled the survival of black babies, implying that at least half of black babies treated by white doctors die.
It was pretty obvious from day one that this finding was driven by omitted variable bias, likely relating to white doctors being more likely to treat the highest-risk cases, but questioning claims about racism is a hallmark of white fragility, which was also out that season, so only a bunch of weirdos objected.
Two weeks ago, PNAS published a second paper showing exactly what went wrong, and it's a doozy. The 2020 paper used, as controls, the 65 most common ICD codes found in newborn records. These included codes for birth weight between 1500 and 2500 grams, but, because they're not among the 65 most common ICD codes, excluded all controls for birth weight below 1500 grams, which was found in 81% of cases of neonatal mortality for black babies.
When adding all ICD codes for low birth weight to the controls, the racial concordance effect disappears: Black newborns attended to by white doctors were no more likely to die than those attended to by black doctors. The new model provides much better fit (r^2 = 0.386 vs. 0.144), and the paper finds that the 65 ICD codes used as controls in the original paper added almost no predictive power, which makes sense: Neonatal mortality is rare, so the most common health conditions seen in newborns should not be particularly dangerous. Despite the appearance of having been chosen rigorously, the controls were functionally haphazard and almost worthless.
Now, one might ask whether white white doctors are causing black babies to be born with very low birth weight, but doctors who treat infants with extremely low birthweight are likely to be specialists called in to save a baby after it's born, not whatever random doctor was providing prenatal care to the mother.
So the finding in the original 2020 paper was, as expected, totally spurious: There does not seem to be any effect of doctor race on neonatal mortality. Curiously, there has been no rush by the media to report on this: 12 days after the paper came out, I have not found a single media report on it.
What's unusual here is that not that a paper claiming to find a huge effect from systemic racism and used to score political points turned out to be driven by omitted variable bias. The entire body of systemic racism literature is little more than a bunch of omitted variables in a trenchcoat made of publication bias. What's unusual is that the key omitted variables were precisely measurable enough and documented thoroughly enough to enable someone to write a rebuttal compelling enough to get published.
On “Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams”
What's the evidence that he's innocent? Since the DNA on the knife came from the prosecutor handling it after the murder, it's not exonerating. The fact that the witnesses were not particularly credible means that their testimony may not be great evidence of guilt, but also is not exonerating. He was in possession of some of the victim's property, which seems to point pretty strongly to guilt.
"
It's worth thinking about what it means that it's more expensive to carry out the death penalty than to keep someone in prison for life. Keeping someone in prison for decades is expensive, and execution itself doesn't cost that much, so where does the extra cost come from?
Mostly it's litigation of extra appeals. This should give you pause, because it means one of two things:
1. We're spending too much time and money on frivolous litigation in death penalty cases.
2. We're not litigating other murder cases enough to justify keeping someone in prison for life.
The greater expense of death penalty cases is not an argument against the death penalty, but evidence that either death penalty cases are more expensive than they need to be or that the legal system is cutting corners with other murder cases.
If the second is true, an interesting corollary is that if you're convicted of a murder you really didn't commit, being sentenced to death gives you the best chance of getting out of prison alive.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/16/2024”
For those of us unfamiliar with the lingo of the cesspit that is LG&M, what is a "starburst?"
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.