State of the Discussion

Given what I've seen AI do to coding, I'm expecting AI to do similar to lawyering.

That is: you won't need paralegals or entry-level staff anymore... hell, you won't need junior partners.

Just Level 3 Engineers and up.

I honestly think Canada should have justified their retaliatory tariffs not as retaliatory, but due to the fentanyl going the other way.

Which is higher. The US is a net exporter of fentanyl over the border.

Actually, the funniest possible thing would be for Canada to say 'Yes, there are things coming across the border illegally, this is a good thing Trump has set up, indeed, we demand a formal treaty that _automatically_ scales tariffs based on outlawed things smuggled over the border.'

Anything illegal. Not just drugs, but _guns_.

Which would not only put Canada far ahead, but Mexico also.

Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom of Reach. The doctor can still say whatever she wants, the university just said "you aren't entitled to say it *HERE*".

If it prevents violence, you have to agree that it's the right decision.

I think we have to be more constructive. The female coded thing is something I feel good telling people to get over. I fully expect that by the time I can retire (if I ever can, God willing) that law will be female coded in a way it was not when I started out. That's what the pipeline looks like and there's no harm in it.

The question becomes what you can do to create mass work at a time when technology is slowly but surely eliminating the demand. Maybe it's FDR style paying people to go out and clear scrub brush. Maybe it's, I dunno, paying people to coach little league. Of course you then have to deal with every dollar being spent on that not being spent on the latest ship killer drone that blows up amphibious landing vessels while they're still out at sea.

What does that have to do with the fact that the Telegraph (And thus Yahoo News) is repeating very obvious unsubstantiated propaganda about how some pro-Israel guy said he looked at some stuff and found some discrepancy that he's apparently not going to make public in any way, and then most of the article is about another pro-Israel guy talking about what those people probably found.

That cannot possible be 'news' in any sense. 'This guy said he discovered some stuff, although produced no evidence of that, and we have another guy here to guess at what he probably discovered!'

Just to add you look at that situation with the longshoreman and port automation. On the one hand those people have good jobs and you hate to see them go. On the other, is it really in the strategic interest of the US to refuse to automate its ports, while China speeds ahead with the technology? It isn't easy stuff.

Well, we are now at the time of year where the Fed reports on how things look, and a lot of companies are required to make _legally accurate_ predictions about future revenue.

This is the things they're saying on anonymous surveys to the Fed:
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tssos/2025/2503#tab-comments

Um...not looking so good.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps saying on Truth Social that people are fighting his tariffs on fentanyl. I would quote the entire thing, but it's an unreadable mess: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114266599439835683

But here's the first sentence: 'Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.'

I'm...pretty sure we haven't put tariffs on fentanyl to make it more costly to distribute and buy.

Yea, on the one hand financialization and globalization have wreaked havoc on low skill manufacturing. On the other times and technology really have changed in important ways.

Over on Yglesias' substack someone shared a rather glib tweet (xeet?) about the lack of upside to bringing back the sock factories from Cambodia. It's harsh but MY isn't totally wrong about that.

While we need to on-shore or friend-shore any number of strategic industries those are probably mostly of the high tech manufacturing variety, and importantly not the type that leads to mass low skill employment with unions and good benefits, etc. like in the days of yore. They're jobs for smaller numbers of people who may still need degrees and/or significant training to operate the mostly automated tools.

So what do you do for those guys? They probably don't make enough for tax cuts to mean anything. Resistance to subsidy is bolstered not just by pointy headed economists but by senses of worth and dignity. It's still not clear to me what you can do for them that doesn't work against creating and holding the other forms of strategic advantage.

Yea it's all good food for thought. Parts 1 and 2 seem like the kind of thing that could even have bipartisan legs. Part 3 I think may he fundamentally in tension with Parts 1 and 2. Constraints on trade for the greater good of our way of life may well be necessary (I agree that they probably are) but the result of that is going to make us poorer in the aggregate, as is re-arming. Not a lot left over to put your fingers on the scale for working families in that environment.

These stats are why I claim that Israel deliberately attacking civilians isn't supported by the numbers. I get that this is really grim and really brutal, but it's also expected with Hamas' style of fighting.

So if 15 ambulance/medical personal die, Israel is doing a good job if 3 of them were Hamas and a great job if 5 of them were.

The most important stat is civilian:military ratios.

My link is to a listing of estimates. The various ratios bounce around over time but between 80% and 66% civilian seem a good median. So between 4:1 and 2:1 civilian:military. At the moment the list leans towards the former but I suspect an edit war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civilian_to_combatant_ratio

IMHO the stat "women and children" is so vague to be worthless. We need to know how many of those "children" are male and how many are female.

The unfortunate reality is a 4:1 ratio is doing better than expected in this kind of war even before factoring in Hamas deliberately putting it's own civilians in danger.

Israel seems to be doing a good but not great job by the standards of urban war.

It’s being widely reported that Facebook is taking down recent posts by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The post detail significant alleged wrong doing by the current regime and were removed with no warning or apparent recourse available to the author.

While corporations are, indeed free to do as they please with their content, suppressing speech like this puts Zuckerberg on par with Musk as slayers of truth.

Yahoo News, wow, that sounds official. Except that's just Telegraph repost, but I guess they sound official, too. Except the story is based on reporting by this site: https://honestreporting.com/

Hmm. That...actually doesn't appear to be any sort of neutral researcher group.

You might notice the distinct lack of any, like, confirmed information in that story. It's just quoting these guys. Hell, half of them are not quotes of _them_, it's the quotes of Andrew Fox _talking about_ what those other people's research, which he has not seen at all, must have uncovered.

What the utter hell? How can anyone take this seriously?

I really like how the article talks about how hard it is to compare the lists cause they're in PDFs and they have to do it by hand. Wow, that sounds like something that _should be made available on the website_, doesn't it? They could easily reformat and show the last three lists as a table, show the changes, show the ages, show the supposedly corrected birthdates and ages, show any evidence that a person was in Hamas .

Except that's actually just Andrew Fox _guessing_ what this other group must have done, so we don't even know they did that.

Really feels like the Telegraph should have gotten that, as the story, instead of just quoting these guys about this, or quoting a guy talking about those guys talking about this.

I think JB is wrong about McCain/Romney and I don't think he's GHWB... so let me see if I can break it down by the good 'ole stool analogy.

Leg 1: Economics/Libertarians
* He's explicitly taking down the Free Market fundamentalists... Markets are good, but markets are basically all about games/rules/incentives. There is no invisible hand.

Leg 2: Foreign Policy/Neo-cons
* He's explicitly acknowledging a multi-polar world order, and the goal isn't maximal containment, but strategic alignment; which means honey/carrots/sticks and the willingness to use whichever is needed. Pax Americana comes with duties from those who participate. But the era of hegemony is over and over-extension will lead to losing our allies in the medium term.

Leg 3: Social/So-Cons
* He's not a bootstrap conservative; he thinks the 47% has been ill-served by the economic policies of Leg #1 and that arbitraging labor *isn't* a comparative advantage in trade; the market should have rules that benefit families and the state has a role in making policies that protect and advance civil society.

None of those things are 'conservative' in the old Republican synthesis kind of way.

But, what Steward missed (this is pretty common) is that challenging the old consensus doesn't mean that the Left's solutions are vindicated -- he's got different ideas from Romney/McCain/Clinton/Obama/Pelosi/Trump/McConnel that he's peddling.

Basically everyone thinks he's wrong about everything, but from different angles. And that's ok.

Maybe I need to read him more to get that. I read the substack post on the 3 demands that seemed to me to be premised on the idea that there is an audience for this within the Trump administration. I have not been able to watch the interview with Jon Stewart and (mistakenly it sounds like) assumed it covered the same ground.

I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren't* on-board. This isn't a Trump/Musk explainer.

Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators -- they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line.

So yeah, that's what makes some of the Stewart interview 'funny' to watch, Cass doesn't have a mission to trash Trump... so he just let's Stewart's jokes roll over him... and he's pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that's the point of the article). But his audience isn't Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists... he explicitly says the targets are 40-under.

Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line...

Eh maybe...?

I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.